covid19

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

CJ and I were trying to find the proportion of severe cases in Shenzhen by age in this horrible little paper (me, after failing to find the pertinent information after looking at all the important looking graphs: maybe it’s time to read the wall of text. / CJ: I have a better idea. Let’s buy plane tickets to China, find the authors, then murder them.)

At the end, we’ve ‘found’ the right figure for the 30-39 range (The only age range with non-zero severe case proportion under age 40) by… using the screencap tool to measure how many pixels the center of the yellow square at 30-39 is from the bottom, and then measuring how many pixels are between the 0 line and the 0.1 line, and determining that 7 pixels over 53 ~= 0.13, so the fraction of severe cases for that age is 0.1*0.13.

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Civilization is maddening!

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #illness tw #covid19 #fun with statistics #death tw? #murder cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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hedgehog-moss:

With each passing day France’s most influential newspaper slips further into absurdist humour with its lockdown recommendations. Someone asked them today: “Shouldn’t we double our self-isolation measures as we near the peak?” and a journalist replied soberly “Yes, we recommend that you even triple them. Excluding emergencies, you may for example self-isolate at home three times a day: from 7am to 3pm, from 3pm to 11pm, then from 11pm to 7am.”

Another reader (pictured above) questioned these drastic instructions: “This schedule is not convenient for me at all. May I, without danger, push it all back by an hour?”

Le Monde journalist: “That should be okay; as long as you don’t go out these requirements are quite flexible. You can actually stay home up to four times a day if that’s more convenient for you: from 6am to noon, from noon to 6pm, then from 6pm to midnight, and finally from midnight to 6am.”

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #illness tw #covid19

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

 

rustingbridges:

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

 

brin-bellway:

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

 

rustingbridges:

this is true, but freezer space is typically the most premium space if you’re trying to build up a reserve, since most people have only a small freezer in their fridge (sidenote: if you want preservation over convenience, turning your fridge all the way to cold may convert part of it into a shitty freezer and will improve longevity in most of the rest of it).

anyway I was at the store and thinking about the toilet paper hypothesis – that it’s bulky and low margin, so stores stock as little as possible to not run out under normal conditions – and this totally applies to bread too. it’s cheap, it’s mostly air, and it expires faster than most stuff. so the tp hypothesis would explain why bread goes quickly too.

I was just thinking earlier today about how grateful I am for the eight people who are not here.

Once upon a time, long before I lived here, this house had a dozen inhabitants. They had *much* lower standards for the amount of indoor living space one person should have–by my own culture’s standards this house is not *ridiculously* roomy, though it could comfortably fit perhaps one or two more people–but nevertheless we have quite a bit of storage space, especially in a pinch.

For people with enough storage space and perhaps stability of housing (both of which, I am aware, are in all-too-short supply for many demographics), I continue to recommend supplementary freezers [link]. Very handy for stockpiling of all kinds. Do try to put them in areas where you can keep an eye on them, though: you don’t want it to go unnoticed if they break or get left open [link]. (I admit that our own freezer placement is not great, and we have occasionally lost food to this. Painful, but I expect it’s still worth it overall. Might also take it upon myself to do routine checks.)

(We also have a secondary mini-fridge, but we currently don’t keep it plugged in. Might come in handy for an intra-household quarantine, though!)

Tags:

#my parents may have run out of money but they still have a generation’s worth of accumulated physical capital #which I am very glad to have access to #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #covid19 #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

judiciousimprecation:

Saw a lady on the bus wearing one of those fancy one-way valved n95 masks, and I tried to figure out why I felt so much irritation with this random stranger.

Obviously the majority of this was just that I was envious she either got ahold of masks before they went out of stock everywhere, or paid a ridiculous price for them, but also I realized, those valved n95 masks are like the exact opposite of regular surgical masks, courtesy-wise.

The surgical masks mostly just block the wearers sneezes and coughs and reduce the amount of infection they might spread, while not doing much to prevent inhaling germs. They are a device which protects bystanders much more than the wearer.

The n95 masks meanwhile, theoretically block all germs from getting into the wearer (modulo proper use), but the one-way valve means unfiltered breath from the wearer makes it back into the atmosphere, thereby blocking way less of the germs they might be exhaling. Thus the valved n95 masks do absolutely fuck-all for bystanders. Fuck you, I got mine

 

etiragram:

Your attitude surprises me. This person is not doing something wrong. Consider the universe where they covered exactly the same route, but without the mask. In that universe, they risked everyone else they came into contact with as much as they did in this one, but also incurred additional risk themself. And in this world, if the mask made a difference, they have reduced the probability of hurting other people by becoming an extra node in the transmitting network.

Feeling irritation with this person for protecting themself without addition protection to others is in some ways akin to feeling irritation for wearing a seat belt. And there’s an aspect to it that’s pretty similar to “How dare this person do the same thing many other people do, but incur fewer costs for it”.

In my opinion, the only thing they could be said to have done wrong is in buying up a scarce resource that some people say medical professionals need far more, but only if they believed they were making more people worse off somewhere and still chose to buy it.

 

judiciousimprecation:

Te be clear, I fully acknowledge that my attitude toward this person was irrational, and I think part of the reason the experience stuck with me was because I was confused about why I was feeling that way. I tried to touch on that in the second paragraph but I definitely could have been more clear that I don’t really endorse it.

I think, having grown up in a country where wearing masks is not a normal thing to do even when (avoiding being) sick, seeing someone wearing a surgical mask tickles the (entirely unendorsed!) “this person is wrong for doing a weird thing, shun them” and normally I compensate for that by reminding myself “no, it’s cool, they’re probably doing it as a courtesy to others, cut them some slack”. Without that loophole it’s much harder to shut that part of my brain up.

I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?), and I’d be incredibly curious to see what a statistical toy model looks like where half the population gets ingress-only masks or egress-only masks, but in retrospect I definitely leaned too hard on the “people wearing valved respirators are jerks who care about no one but themselves” angle

Back before COVID-19, I bought a valved mask in significant part because I figured signalling “this mask is for my protection, not yours” would make me look like *less* of a jerk.

(‘I’m not going out in public while sick, I promise! I’m just highly sensitive to pollen! I’m not dangerous, please don’t be scared!’)

Turns out the valve was a weak point and the mask failed almost immediately. Mom wants to try tinkering with it and seeing if she can repair it, but I’m probably back to surgical masks for the foreseeable future. I was already worried that I was going to scare people who saw me take off a surgical mask on my way into the restaurant and then go and serve them food, and that’s probably even *more* of a concern in the midst of a plague.

—

>>I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?)<<

The impression I got reading your OP is that the reason it was bothering you is that it *wasn’t* prisoner’s dilemma, that she *could* have protected herself *and* others (with a non-valved N95) but instead chose to protect only herself, sacrificing others’ *safety* for her *comfort* (slightly less restricted breathing, less foggy glasses if applicable).

(this is speaking about the hypothetical world where your intuition was justified; in the endorsed world she may very well have had access to valved N95s but not non-valved)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #illness tw #covid19 #allergies #anxiety #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

englishproblems:

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Tags:

#so apparently handwashing memes are a thing now #which feels… #it feels like a piece of set dressing you’d see in a work of apocalyptic fiction #a little poignant note about coping mechanisms #did you ever see that post about memes people would make during the apocalypse? #there was a meme from a world where an asteroid was about to hit #took an artist’s conception of an asteroid hitting Earth #added a then-perish image on the asteroid and a guess-I’ll-die image on the Earth #this feels disturbingly like that #tag rambles #death tw #apocalypse cw #illness tw #covid19 #Shakespeare