US Confirms First Case of Coronavirus From Unknown Origin (sacbee.com) 239
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a resident from Northern California has contracted the coronavirus without traveling outside the United States or coming in contact with another patient known to have the infection -- the first sign that the disease may be spreading within a local community. The Sacramento Bee reports: "It is a confirmed case. There is one in Northern California," CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Sacramento Bee just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. In the Northern California case, "the individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County. The individual had no known exposure to the virus through travel or close contact with a known infected individual," California Department of Public Health officials said in a news release Wednesday evening. State public health officials in Sacramento, citing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the case is the first person-to-person transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
Earlier cases of person-to-person transmission in Illinois and in San Benito County came "after close, prolonged interaction with a family member who returned from Wuhan, China, and had tested positive for COVID-19," California Department of Public Health officials said in their Wednesday statement. Dr. Sonia Angell, the state's public health officer, called the outbreak an "evolving situation" that the state had been monitoring since the first cases in China late last year. but added "there is a lot we already know." "We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California," Angell said in prepared remarks. Earlier today, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence will lead the government's response to the virus. In the rare White House address, Trump maintained that the risk to the U.S. from the virus "remains very low."
Earlier cases of person-to-person transmission in Illinois and in San Benito County came "after close, prolonged interaction with a family member who returned from Wuhan, China, and had tested positive for COVID-19," California Department of Public Health officials said in their Wednesday statement. Dr. Sonia Angell, the state's public health officer, called the outbreak an "evolving situation" that the state had been monitoring since the first cases in China late last year. but added "there is a lot we already know." "We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California," Angell said in prepared remarks. Earlier today, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence will lead the government's response to the virus. In the rare White House address, Trump maintained that the risk to the U.S. from the virus "remains very low."
Don't try to stop a Horseman (Score:3)
You don't understand him.
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Between CircleCI builds. Sure.
Re: COVFEFE-20 (Score:2)
Ahem. COVFEED-21.
Re: Don't try to stop a Horseman (Score:2)
The solution I'm advocating is obvious. And I'd destroy you also at atheism argument, and technical productivity.
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What solution? Hope and pray?
Yeah, that sure beats doing nothing.
Re: Don't try to stop a Horseman (Score:2)
Understand a metaphysics that removes the danger of death in a permanent sense. You know, that thing you don't have.
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Metaphysics you say? Last we checked metaphysics never has any physical manifestations so how can it remove the danger of death. I think what you mean is, believe this salve we conjured from thin air so you don't quake in your boots when you are about to bite the big one.
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Well, considering how fat the average American is, Famine really dropped the ball here.
Re: Don't try to stop a Horseman (Score:2)
Doomed guy makes fat joke.
Film at 11.
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Every time someone tells me I'm doomed I can't help but think of that [youtube.com].
Although, I somehow have that hunch that you'd be more like this [youtube.com]...
Re: Don't try to stop a Horseman (Score:2)
tl;dr
Proceed with being doomed. But don't feel totally unproductive, you'll undoubtedly have produced something I can use.
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start testing now (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah... If only they lived in a rich country. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where everyone could afford to go to a doctor to check if their symptoms are just a cold or covid-19.
Not in a shithole country where four out of ten people can't scrape together $400 [cnbc.com] while insurance companies will gouge them for over $3000 [miamiherald.com] just for the privilege of testing their blood for the virus.
I.e. People will simply try to ignore the symptoms cause they can't afford to be sick.
And then more people will be sick.
All thanks to Dumpeacho's fixation with undoing everything Obama did.
And it gets worse. A LOT. WORSE. [msnbc.com]
It's plague country. Because racism, capitalism and guns.
And here's hoping FOX doesn't air Outbreak any time soon.
Cause if they do, knowing how Dumpeacho gets his "best" ideas from bad movies [youtube.com]... USA will also become a MOAB country. [nbcnews.com]
Re:Ah... If only they lived in a rich country. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this. Thanks to our weak and moth eaten social safety net, every major city has a large reservoir of potential vectors that can't afford to be tested, can't afford to see the doctor, and can't take a sick day. Unless they are too sick to get out of bed they'll be there making your food and coffee, vacuuming your office, signing you in at the front desk, checking you out at the store, etc, etc.
For those reasons, the U.S. is the most vulnerable of all 1st world nations to a COVID19 epidemic. Given the higher prevalence of international travel, the U.S. may be more vulnerable than many developing nations.
Good Luck, you'll need it!
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So the only alternative to really freeze the spread is to stop all airline flights. It would make 9/11 seem like an exercise.
Re:Ah... If only they lived in a rich country. (Score:5, Insightful)
That wouldn't do it. We;d need to implement mandatory paid sick days and free health care, at least for the duration of the emergency.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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In the 1990s the Clinton Administration carried out an exercise with a simulated release of pneumonic plague in a Boulder concert hall. Within a week healthcare system of Colorado was teetering on collapse, there were no available respirators or ventilators in a four state area, and there was a worldwide run on antibiotics of any kind. After ten days cases were appearing in Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. The result of the test scared the crap out of Clinton and the rest of his advisors and he had the CDC
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Using fear to drive government policy is always a bad idea. What good did the massive supplies in containers do? What good will antibiotics do now against a viral outbreak?
If there is a massive outbreak of anything, there will always be casualties, there is no society in the world prepared to get 10% of their population sick, even China, the most prosperous of socialist and communist countries couldn't do it with heavy government force. They are literally taking people from their homes, forcing isolation, a
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Using fear to drive government policy is always a bad idea.
So complacency is better? The Push Packs had antibiotics, antivirals, respirator filters, biohazard suits, test kits, and many other rapidly-exhausted consumables. Modern just-in-time inventory practices ensure that there is **very** little extra capacity in the system.
burning alive the sick and elderly
Hyperbole much?
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It's hard to argue against preparedness, but it's also not hard to see how the odds work against doing it successfully.
I kind of doubt you can stuff a container full of anything other than disposable masks, linens and other inert products and expect to have it useful and functional more than 2-5 years out. Theft, environmental degradation, poor storage/contamination, etc, can contribute to an expensive container load of uselessness.
All of this means containers need to be constantly refreshed -- new medicin
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Umm . . . are you really proposing the involvement of the Pentagram as a way to reduce waste?
The CDC had the program pretty well mapped out and managed, and the contents would have been adjusted to the most current or upcoming threat according to the latest data. Medicines that were approaching expiration would be donated to VA hospitals so the actual cost of drug upkeep to the government was minimized. It actually seemed like a fairly well-run program, which is probably why the wingnuts felt compelled to
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Okay Bernie, how are you going to pay for that? The emergency will likely last for months if not years. Mandatory sick pay while the economy is dead for 2 years? Even China had to force their sick people back to work in Wuhan and I got note from one of my production sites that Shengzen has also been 'cleared to work' even though the cities are heavily affected.
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If we were to take the needed steps now, there might not be an emergency or it might be a lot smaller. So the question is, how are you going to pay for not taking the needed steps? (let me guess, it involves sticking everyone else with the bills claiming it was just their rotten luck).
Let's frame it another way, if you as an employer apply coercion to your employees to work while sick, you are recklessly endangering your customers and other employees. Which is why my advice to people forced to work while si
Re:Ah... If only they lived in a rich country. (Score:4)
You know who else has wonderful free health care and massive government "services"? China.
Right now they're busy boarding people up in their own homes after quarantining hundreds of millions of people. For the "greater good" or something.
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I can tell you exactly what's going to happen here in Canada if shit goes sideways. Since all healthcare is already rationed and at or above capacity, it's going to get ugly and quickly. In the US hospitals are built around profitability, meaning that in general there are more hospital beds comparatively to Canada where it can take 40 years to build a new hospital that needed to be built 40 years ago. If you think that 4:10 people can't scrape together $400, just wait until you find out that up here 50%
Re:Ah... If only they lived in a rich country. (Score:5, Informative)
Canada is actually going to be doing BETTER.
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JesuCare takes care of you. But only in the next life.
Yeah, there's always a catch.
Re: aeropage / Empiric (Score:2)
No, it's making me and my kind stronger and more fit. Your kind, it's just systematically killing off. Let's meet up in 150 years and see how it's going for each of us, shall we? Pencil you in?
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- Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases
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Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Misleading (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
I too had similar thinking, but the situation has more nuance.
The flu numbers are based on a lot of studies and a statistical extrapolation of people who have the flu, but never get a positive diagnosis. For example, the 3.7 million sick number does not mean that 3.7 million people actually went to a doctor and got tested for flu.
For the COVID-19 numbers, it is strictly counting those actually diagnosed by a medical professional. At this point there's no data to extrapolate to even begin to guess the undiagnosed cases. Additionally, while many cases don't technically count as 'resolved', they may be as good as healthy at this point.
Re: Misleading (Score:2)
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Yes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I have seen 'but the flu has killed more people' trotted out without consideration of total infections, and that's woefully underestimating the situation.
Hard to put forth the nuanced reality without erring on one side or the other.
Re: Misleading (Score:2)
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No, there's not enough data to suggest the death rate is anything.
We've got evidence of asymptomatic carriers already. We have no idea how many there are. If there are a million people with COVID-19 wandering around fairly healthy but spreading it, that throws your death rate out the window. This has the potential to be way worse than the flu as well as the same as the flu and also way better than the flu.
At the moment, it looks like this doesn't tend to kill children, which the flu very much does. So in te
Re: Misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Currently 8% of all resolved cases have resulted in death.
Those numbers have been dropping fairly rapidly over the last couple of days as more people recover and fewer people die per day. Not to mention that those number completely discount the likely large population of people who suffered minor symptoms and were never formally tested.
Having said that, I would take China's numbers with a large grain of salt in general. It's likely that far more people have died in China due to coronavirus, and also likely that an even greater number of people have been infected. We won't know the real death rate until we start getting more established numbers from countries with better track records for reporting infection and death rates.
Re: Misleading (Score:2)
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The death rate for Covid-19 is approx. 2.3% (in China), the death rate for the flu in the U.S. is 0.05%.
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How deadly a disease is is mostly dependent on a few factors. In our time and age, mostly on how contagious it is, how deadly it is once you have it and how long you are an infection vector before the first symptoms set in.
This one is the jackpot in all three categories (unlike the "cold" you mention there). Quite a long symptom-free infection vector period (that's the main problem here), incredibly contagious and a fair chance of death.
It's the combination that makes it more dangerous than the common flu.
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If I needed a test because I'd suspect that I was infected I could contact the local health service and get whatever tests considered necessary for $10 to $20 as a cost to me - that's what I'll have to pay for a visit to the doctor.
Can we patent that virus? (Score:2)
Because nothing is for real in the US unless it's patented by a major corporation.
Nope (Score:3)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Funny)
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Yep, every time they sneeze
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Once they have a vaccine or medicine they can charge for, THEN they'll be on it!
Time for telecommuting! (Score:3, Insightful)
Feel stupid now, all you business execs who insisted everyone needs to meet in the same room daily to save business costs at the expense of both the environment and the employees? You could have paid all the "hidden costs" long ago, by now. Now you're gonna have to scramble just to not die. Fun.
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Are you suggesting that we abandon human to human interaction for fear that at some point we may get sick?
Talk about a case of the cure being worse than the illness.
Perhaps you are fine to dwell in your basement, but I think others are happier around other people.
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It's not a bad temporary measure if/when the situation calls for it.
You probably won't miss that guy two rows over that eats WAY too many beans or the person a few cubicles over that apparently thinks of cologne as "shower in a bottle".
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Yes, you are indeed quite the clever boy. It's a good thing we never had any epidemics in the past, because telecommuting wasn't even invented!
However, I am sure that with your winning personality and rapier wit, you are ideally suited to survive - it's not really quarantine if people avoid you under normal circumstances.
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Feel stupid now, all you business execs who insisted everyone needs to meet in the same room daily to save business costs at the expense of both the environment and the employees? You could have paid all the "hidden costs" long ago, by now. Now you're gonna have to scramble just to not die. Fun.
Who has to scramble? Work from home isn't the only reason to use video conferencing and other remote tools like digital whiteboards. Is there any sizable corporation that doesn't already have a video conference system in place? My company prefers on-site workers yet ever conference room is also rigged for video conferencing and anyone can connect using their computer.
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Your company probably hasn't really put those systems to much of a test and the managers have little to no experience managing teleworkers. The workers have little to no experience teleworking.
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Actually, my company highly encourages telecommuting now, we have to go to office for more than 50% of the time for legal reasons but it's been hinted that nobody will check too closely what days you really were in when you were officially in office.
It's basically them saying "stay the fuck away if you don't need to be here!"
JAMA Report (Score:3)
If you're not going to take the time to read and try to understand a scenario with the benefit of specific terms and quantitative methods of the medical profession...
What are you really doing?
False positive rate? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere: What is the accuracy of the test that identifies Corona? Nearly all tests have a certain rate of false positives and false negatives. When identifying one isolated case like this, I wonder if it might just be a false positive.
Anyone have information on the testing process?
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Renal failure and other effects (Score:4, Informative)
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Now I've got a Blue Oyster Cult earworm (Score:3)
Death comes sweeping through the hallway, like a lady's dress
Death comes driving down the highway, in it's Sunday best
A virus of Chinese origin took my baby away
A virus of Chinese origin took my baby away
Swept to ruin off my wavelength, swallowed her up
Like the ocean in a fire, so thick and gray
A virus of Chinese origin took my baby away
A virus of Chinese origin took my baby away
Death comes driving, I can't do nothing! Death goes.
There must be something, there must be something that remains
etc...
So an UVO? (Score:2)
Unidentified Viral Origin?
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You mean this?
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentra... [biomedcentral.com]
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I'd guess suppressing info because it's a bioweapon. 20%(1:5 cases) serious health complications(25% is the aim to destabilize a country). 3 scientists from the wuhan lab were arrested, tried, and imprisoned in late October of last year for selling animal remains and parts to the wet markets in the area. I seem to remember at least one of them made $1m or so selling remains, which was the big tip off.
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Also the top mil staff sent to try and clean up the mess.
New and top staff changes.
The need to remind labs to actually do their work to a good standard.
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Well we are talking about China. Where anything that isn't official is a conspiracy theory, kinda like this nice little leaked document. [epochtimes.com]
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Sourcing the Moonies? Really?
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So you can't dispute that the information presented is wrong? If you can I'm sure everyone would love to hear it.
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Give me a source at least more authoritative than the Weekly World News and I might consider clicking through, but since the Moonies' sites have been known to host spyware in the past I'm not even going to bother.
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Try look at the size of the quarantine area. For example here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns
The quarantine affected roughly 57 million people in the Hubei province.
The size of Hubei is about 1/2 of California.
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It's a lovely view of the I-5 corridor from here, that leads to the international airports that offer trans-pacific flights.
Also lovely is my very well stocked pantry, my liquor cabinet full of fine blended scotch and single malts, a downloaded library of books, and of course an assortment of well-maintained firearms suitable for different tactical situations. Last not but not least, my all wheel drive utility vehicle with a full tank of gas and loaded with survival gear.
Should I decide I want to fuck-off to my fall-back position in the woods, I'll regret not being able to watch my very progressive betters eat themselves in their bright-blue districts as they wait for the government to save them.
Have a wonderful day!
Unless you've got a squad of trained people with you, if it gets to the point where you need to use those firearms, you're going to be overwhelmed.
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Unless you've got a squad of trained people with you, if it gets to the point where you need to use those firearms, you're going to be overwhelmed.
Well, chances are I'll at least get to fire off a few warning shots at some opportunists, Roof Korean style. I doubt I'd want to hang around until the Walking Dead style gangs with barbwire-bat wielding leaders start showing up. That's why you should always have a backup plan.
Security in layers.
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You've already spent a ton on worthless precautions and measures that will be meaningless. You are already a victim of your own paranoia. But do carry on.
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When the SHTF you'll be begging for help from someone just like him. The government bureaucrats you idolize will be nowhere to be found.
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Who needs vaccines when you have prayer.
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Who needs vaccines when you know they cause autism. - The elite and highly educated intelligentsia in major cities.
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s/getting/ignoring/
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TDS is the ability to believe Trump. And his CDC director is a political appointee who dare not be truthful about Covid-19 less he have what's left of his reputation savaged working in the alleged administration.
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I never thought to see a time when putting "worked at the White House 2016-2020" would be seen as a resume stain.
Talk about unbelievable... (Score:2)
TDS is the ability to believe Trump. And his CDC director is a political appointee
TDC-45 is the inability to believe the head scientist of the CDC, which is what you are doing and man you got it bad. He's only a "political appointee" in that a politician appointed him, true of ALL CDC heads. I mean, read his CV [cdc.gov] - you are seriously claiming the "founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research within the U.S. Militaryâ(TM)s HIV Research Program" is someone you should not listen to on viruses
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So this fixation you appear to have with anuses, is this something you inherited or was it environmentally induced?
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You're about to see the limits of that unlimited "free" health care. They'll be overwhelmed almost immediately and the people who try to go will just be exposed more.
You can only rely on yourself and your own preparations. If you're expecting big daddy government to take care of you then you deserve whats coming.
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Hey now... we all know that Trump's Ego is the most powerful antiviral agent known to mankind. Trump said so himself!
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-World Economy, what could possibly go wrong?
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