Coronavirus and Pandemics

I've marked my calendar for two weeks out in order to remind me of when to look for reports of Pence popping positive for CV. Same thing for those idiot protesters a week earlier, so we should expect to see an increase of cases after this weekend, just in time for Cinco de Mayo.

This year, Cinco de Mayo would have been on Taco Tuesday. A perfect storm! All screwed up by this virus and the Mango Menace's gross mismanagement of this crisis.

I was about to post the same observation, though I also heard it brought up in the news (not in the Fake News Network).NYC and environs has been a significant contributor of the overall statistics (ie, raw data points), which by their sheer volume can swamp the analysis on the national scale. We need to also be looking at individual regions of the US to see what's happening there. Relative stability in major population centers on the coasts can easily mask alarming increases of cases in the rural MidWest and other less-populated regions which already lack the healthcare infrastructure needed to handle those cases.We need to see what's happened region-by-region. Until every region has been stabilized, nobody's safe.

My son is a cop. Problem with being a cop is that you need to be on a force. A lot of demand for those positions, very few to be had. Basically, he lost his last position for medical reasons (trying to up his physical readiness, he took out his Achilles tendon).In a recent communication (ie, a few months ago), he tried to connect me with a local gun range. To ready myself.

Same here. I only go out for groceries or necessities or to take my car for a walk in order to keep its battery charged. I have never been a shopper, so I need to know where something is before I go to buy it. My favorite line from King of the Hill was by Hank the first time he went to the MegaloMart (their version of WalMart): "You know, there's something to be said for a store where you can buy underwear and spark plugs under the same roof."I've been using a no-sewing kludge based on a YouTube video in which you use two t-shirt sleeves as the mask and the bottom seam as "string". Because the two sleeve form a kind of pocket (especially if you fold up and safety-pin the bottom, you can add some kind of filter material (she uses a coffee filter, I seem to recall). I just found it again: It works well enough, definitely better than the kludges made from a folded handkerchief and rubber bands. However, mine got twisted around and rather unruly today when I went to a medical appointment.So since a prescription was waiting for me at the near-by Walgreen's, I went in and, just in case, asked the clerk about masks. They have them. Disposables and reusables. I bought a 3-pak of reusable cotton masks, washable 40 times, single-ply, made in China, cost about 6 USD. Seems kind of thin, but if I want more I could stick a handkerchief inside it.And I'm sure that you could also find something on Amazon.com.

Like most everything else in this fuster cluck, the free market couldn't handle the initial panic and hoarding and then took quite a while to catch up.In the stores, bottled water seemed to make a quick come-back, though it took pasta and other dry goods a bit longer. Then toilet paper a little bit at a time -- I usually get mine as that big pack from CostCo which lasts me for more than half a year; I still had about 4 months worth when this started and now they're back in CostCo. Yeast (active dry) was a long time coming and it's still sketchy -- I've seen it twice now in the past month (and have gotten one string of 3 packets each both times). And canned soup, one of the first things to go, is coming back as well.So the same with masks. Very little demand until suddenly everybody needed one and couldn't find any. You had to either sew your own or have a good friend who sewed or codge together some kind of kludge like I had to.BTW, anybody else notice one of the big new form of video on Facebook early on? Videos of pets (dogs or cats) being trained to run steeplechases down the hallways. And what were the steeplechases made out of? Toilet paper! That's what they did with their hoarded loot?

And now Trump is shutting down testing because if you test then you find new cases, so if you stop testing then you stop finding new cases. A perfect plan for lowering the numbers.That just made me realize that Trump is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. My emphasis added:

quote:

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The importance of the towel was introduced in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy original radio series in 1978. The follow-up book explained the importance of towels in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe in Chapter 3, using much of the same wording as the original radio series:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

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So, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, Trump thinks that he can't see something then it doesn't exist.BTW, Towel Day is on 25 May, so we just missed (guess we were slightly preoccupied with other stuff). The quote above is from that page. Also, a slogan for Towel Day consists of the words printed in big friendly letters on the cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic.

 For those unfamiliar with TCP/IP and with C[-ish]:

• 255.255.255.0 is a Class C subnet mask that is used to identify which subnet a host is on.
• 127.0.0.1 is localhost, meaning the host that the program is running on.
• || is the OR relational operator in C and related languages.

Therefore: "Wear a mask or stay at home."