Coronavirus and Pandemics

Seems totally legit. You must provide them with that information right away. This stimulus money is, after all, being generously provided by a Nigerian prince.

Los Angeles mayor urges residents to wear masks to stem coronavirus spread--Percy

It's a 6-minute story from NPR, fascinating: Planet Money: The Parable Of The Piston : NPRTried to embed, didn't work.--Percy

Family members are making their own and say there is a movement of sorts to do that. I didn't look it up but apparently there are websites with patterns, and the most popular one uses a certain kind of furnace filter inside a cloth pocket.

Sure, why not.The mean, median, and mode walk into a Republican barThe median says "Wow, this place is really skewed to the right!"The mode was taller than everyone else and got the most looks.Meanwhile, the mean was overly influenced by outliers and got high off to the side.

Finally there's somebody in the trump administration you can trust.

A relief story.Long long ago when I was writing software programs for a bunch of marine biologists one wanted a program to analyze some survey results for mean, median and mode. So I wrote it but he was disappointed with the mode results. What he wanted was a list of what mode of fishing; from a boat, a pier, surf fishing ...

Reminds me of a request for help on a C programming forum that I used to contribute to.The request was for C code to implement a "Barber poll". Well, obviously this was some kind of statistical analysis technique that we hadn't heard about, so we asked for more information and a more complete description of what he was trying to do. He replied with, "you know, that twirly thing in front of a barber shop."The forum was international with the foreign members for whom English was not their first language. That idiot was obviously a native English speaker, since he had no clue how to spell -- the most atrociously bad English was committed by native speakers. A non-English speaker would not have made such a stupid mistake, but instead would have slightly odd sentence structure or wordings or would have chosen the wrong word from the dictionary. But other than that, their English would be far superior to native speakers' (especially the SMS kiddies).For example, a student in Portugal wanted to know how to use "lights" in multi-threaded programming. That made absolutely no sense and nobody could figure out what he was talking about. Knowing some Spanish, I had a hunch which I followed in Wikipedia, switching between languages. In multi-processing, the processes' access to common resources is coordinated (AKA "synchronized") through various software mechanisms including semaphores (ie, signals as in signal flags, etc). The word in Spanish for traffic signal is "semforo" and that also turns out to be the word in Portuguese. When he looked up semforo in his dictionary, it translated that to "lights" which is what we call our "traffic lights".

This has several stories, click on play and go to time 15:35 for the story on masks: This report still includes the nonsense that a mask only prevents virus from leaving someone's mouth and nose, not from entering someone else's mouth and nose. "The cloth mask does not protect the wearer," says the interviewee. This is false, strikingly obviously false. The fallacy is so obvious and so simple it's almost difficult to explain.Let's say an infected person isn't wearing a mask and breathes or coughs or sneezes virus into the air. You *are* wearing a mask, but the interviewee is saying it doesn't prevent the virus from getting through, even though if the infected person had instead been wearing the mask it *would* have prevented the virus from getting through. That's contradictory and so must be false.I can't believe it takes so many words to explain something so simple. Can someone explain this in a brief ten words or so? Or if I'm wrong explain why I'm wrong?The interviewee is incredibly evasive at the end. The interviewer asks if she should wear a mask when she goes to the grocery store or takes out the trash, and whether the interviewee wears a mask. The interviewee answers a completely different question.--Percy

Omigod, of course. I have about 10 square feet of furnace microfilter material in the basement. Can you find out what kind they're using?--Percy

It's come to this: Liberal San Francisco Bay Area bans reusable grocery bags - POLITICO, reports Politico. This is a mistake.The reasoning for why it's a mistake goes like this. When you visit a grocery store it is safe to assume you are entering a building that infected people have visited. Grocery stores should be assumed to be hotbeds of coronavirus because they are visited by hundreds of people a day, some percentage of which are infected.All surfaces in the grocery store will have coronavirus on them, including the plastic bags they provide. They sit there 24 hours a day every single day. When you bring one home you are bringing home plastic upon which coronavirus have been depositing for days and days. It has been widely reported that virus can live for up to 72 hours on polypropylene plastic. Grocery bags are made from polyethylene plastic, but it's not too chemically dissimilar from polypropylene. The backbone of polypropylene bonds alternately to H and CH₃, while the backbone of polyethylene bonds only to H.When you bring home a grocery store bag you are bringing into your home a bag steeped in coronavirus for days. When you bring your reuseable bag into the grocery store it is only there an hour.If the grocery store allows reuseable bags into the store then they risk allowing in ones that were in an infected environment, but the person carrying those bags was also in the infected environment and may even be infected themselves, so the increase in risk is nil.Grocery stores are only making things worse by banning reuseable bags.The grocery stores in our area have banned reuseable bags. They've also instituted maximum occupancy limitations, which makes sense.--Percy

And it’s not beyond believable that your empty reusable bags could sit in the garage for a week between uses, either. Or get run through the clothes dryer right before they go shopping.....

My local grocery stores banned reusable bags a week or so ago.

Sent email requesting information about the furnace filter etc., should hear back soon.

In Desperation, New York State Pays Up to 15 Times the Normal Prices for Medical Equipment

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With the coronavirus outbreak creating an unprecedented demand for medical supplies and equipment, New York state has paid 20 cents for gloves that normally cost less than a nickel and as much as $7.50 each for masks, about 15 times the usual price. It’s paid up to $2,795 for infusion pumps, more than twice the regular rate. And $248,841 for a portable X-ray machine that typically sells for $30,000 to $80,000.

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This payment data, provided by state officials, shows just how much the shortage of key medical equipment is driving up prices. Forced to venture outside their usual vendors and contracts, states and cities are paying exorbitant sums on a spot market ruled by supply and demand. Although New York’s attorney general has denounced excessive prices, and ordered merchants to stop overcharging people for hand sanitizers and disinfectant sprays, state laws against price gouging generally don’t apply to government purchases.

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With little guidance from the Trump administration, competition among states, cities, hospitals and federal agencies is contributing to the staggering bill for fighting the pandemic, which New York has estimated will cost it $15 billion in spending and lost revenue. The bidding wars are also raising concerns that facilities with shallow pockets, like rural health clinics, won’t be able to obtain vital supplies.

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