So we've been going that route. Honestly, I handle the product with gloves and wipe down packaging with Lysol when putting away. No method is perfect but I think overall it reduces my possible exposure.

One of our contracts managers hospitalised this afternoon with suspected CV-19. He works from a different office base than me, and I don’t know him well, but it’s getting closer... :(

@cutiger : Transmission via surfaces is a lot less effective than via persons directly. It is possible and surely happens in ideal conditions (short time frame, lots of virus, 'good material' like stainless steel) but the risk is much less.

Especially since really all you need to do to lower that even closer to 0% is wash your hands with soap after handling the goods. It wont transmit via the air from goods. Everything after that initial handling of the goods approaches "well, but a plane could hit my house" territory. Same for delivered food.

You can't wash the virus from your mouth/nose after someone sheds virus from his 'face' to yours, but easily from your hands after touching sth that might (!) have enough virus to infect you.

Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College London model, which previously projected 2.2 million dead in the U.S. and 500k in the U.S. unless the precautions were taken (this was the report that really got governments and private industry moving), now estimates 20k or fewer will die in the UK. This seems to be based on the precautions taken, and the speed of infection and estimated lack of lethality of the virus. They've increased their of estimate how many people an average person will infect (and had already infected before the lockdowns), I think that was a part of the recent Oxford model as well.

USA is now #1 in total cases on Worldometer. And we know the infected is at least 10x that. This thing is spreading like wildfire.

I think on either way, you would want to disinfect the food coming in. After all, you have no idea who has been touching the can of beans you've picked up (the people putting them on the shelves and those touching but not buying). By getting pickup you have one point of contact, where you can protect your face/hands (have them put it in your trunk) and then immediately wash your hands when getting home after disinfecting your food.

Less potential point of contacts than with a supermarket full of people - who you have to try to stand 6 ft away from each individual.

Unless the restrictions came to late ... I find it at least noteworthy the UK and Italy numbers were very similar at the respective time of lockdown. And the UK started this thing with lower capacities for Ventilators than Italy by a decent margin.

He definitely is a proper Expert so wouldnt presume to know better than him :) but it's not like there is a ton of precedent and the recent data is very incomplete even though the UK has 20% more Tests total than Italy had March 9th but still similar enough.

And 20k despite the measures taken is still a whole lot. Still you just know people will claim it was overkill since "thats hardly more than a bad flu year !"

Wikipedia has excellent pages for many countries btw, putting officially available stats in easily digestable tables:

2020 coronavirus pandemic in Italy - Wikipedia

2020 coronavirus pandemic in Italy - Wikipedia

2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States - Wikipedia

2020 coronavirus pandemic in Germany - Wikipedia

I wonder if you are using one of the supermarket's own programs to pick up your food you may be able to avoid having your food put on the checkout belt, which has to be one of the worst contagion vectors in the supermarket (I haven't seen anybody disinfecting those).

Germany has opened up criteria for testing further btw with the increasing capacity, so more positives now for a bit would not be a bad thing necessarily.

And a manufacturer (Bosch) aparently managed to design a self-operating analytical test that tests for Covid, Flu and others in about 2 1/2 hours. More a device to be used in general practices rather than mass testing, but still a good thing.

German firm Bosch to cut coronavirus test time ‘to 2½ hours’

When I was looking into delivery options this is what they told me:

First off, if you have gloves, wear them.
Remove everything from the bags
Throw away bags.
Wash hands.
Put groceries away (perishable items first)
Wash hands again


the thing you have to worry about with delivery and that kinda thing is that you touch a surface that may be infect then touch your face to transmit it. It doesn't last long on exposed surfaces but still, better safe than sorry.

Our grocery store was spraying down everything after each customer. They set up a black line so you couldn't put your groceries on the conveyer till the other person was done. They also had a big sneeze guard up to protect the cashier.

The risk from contact is much less than it is from person-to-person. These viruses are weak and transferring from a hand to a box to a conveyer belt to a cashier to a bagger and to you is slim. Just wash your hands after touching containers you bring into the house. Like if I make a frozen dinner, I take it out of the box, throw out the box, and wash my hands.

If you're shopping still like me, just keep a distance from people. That's how you catch this. Everyone at the store by me was real patient with people. Waiting on someone in an aisle before grabbing something on a shelf close by. If you do that, you should be fine.

Not for this disease ... It's dangerous and spreads fast, but it's not the virus from "Contagion" either. In the big scheme of things transmissions going from "face to hand to surface to hand to face" will make up a small percentage (despite everybody touching a million things a day). And now you are adding another Transmission where it has to survive going from a product to the checkout belt to another product.

This isnt how this sort of virus spreads thankfully or we would be having a much different scenario right now and not one i hope we'll ever see ...

I honestly wouldn't be that much stock in the total cases, or what proportion that is of the full extent of the spread, etc. Testing is going differently in each country and even within countries. I.e. we are ramping up our testing in the US, so at any one particularly time I think it's not possible to have any kind of accurate guesstimate as to how many more there are out there that we don't know about.

I'm still watching the info on the hospitals and the overall deaths. Until that starts going down, we aren't past the worst of it. We're not doing as badly on that front as I thought we would be by now, but I can't draw any firm conclusions as to why yet.

Some suggestions from within Italy that the number of deaths is actually higher as if it was not bad enough :( The number of deaths for February and March in a lot of towns and cities apparently a lot higher than previous years with a considerable gap not filled by official Covid19 deaths. Some smaller town are f.e. has about 35 for both months usually but 150 this year yet only 30 officially from Covid19.

Could definitely be a bit higher and not unreasonable to think that people dying alone in the coutryside never get diagnosed properly even now with how overburdened everything is...

Looking at those deviations from the average is pretty much how the numbers for the seasonal flu are calculated btw ...

So was looking at the worldmeter and shows US 83k infected and only 1200 deaths but more concerning it only shows 1200 recovered of the 83k and 80k active cases. So looks like in the next week to 10 days we are fixing to see how bad this gets. Hopefully most recover but still hard to say.

Recovered might not be properly tracked, especially those that never need hospital admission and are merely send home and told to stay inside. The authorities dont have the time for it over here despite the Situation being ok overall and i doubt they are better staffed in, say, New York.

Edit: and yeah, what molson said.

It takes at least two weeks to consider someone "recovered", and two weeks ago, there was only something like 1,600 reported cases in the U.S., and they were only testing people who met very specific conditions (including people who were being hospitalized). The recovered numbers will pick up once we get two weeks+ from when testing increased.

I stopped doing Instacart last week. Just not worth it. Annoying thing now is I’m delivering amazon packages and I really just wanna snap “stay the fuck inside” at all the people who want to get it from your hand.

I may file for unemployment, but have to assess the situation. Haven’t done an Uber ride in 4 weeks and the food delivery apps get totally tedious. I’m basically down like 50% on money or more and it’s becoming more unsafe.

What Molson said on the recovered stat. People die relatively faster than they recover, because if you die it usually doesn't take that long (morbid, but I don't know a better way to say it).

It gets real bad when the hospitals get overrun. Just a matter of time here. China consolidated it to Wuhan mostly but we are going to have like 15 Wuhans in a couple weeks.

Spain now officially in Italy territory :(. 700+ today.

From what I have read about transmission it is FAR more likely you will get it from droplets as opposed to surface contact. I would rather have one person, the shopper, handle my items than walk around a store with X other people and take the chance someone sneezed or coughed in the aisle I am about to walk in.

The reality is someone is touching those items several times, so you are never going to be 100% safe but the less exposure to other humans IMO the better.

Once the shopper started getting my items it was super easy. I get the sense things are still happening but the communication can't keep up. She also delivered it for me earning a fat tip, worked out great for everyone.

Birx is saying model predictions is not matching the facts on the ground and they are trying to understand why.

I took this to mean model is predicting much worse than what they've seen. Bad as Italy is, its not as bad as what the model predicted.

Will have to read more post-press conference to understand more.

Interesting tidbit from Fauci, they are going to (try) start vaccine production even if the vaccine trials are not completely proven yet. Because if/when they are proven, they want to get that jump start (but there is a risk it was for naught).

Fauci is talking about random control trials with therapies. Good that they are trying to push this info out.

The pattern is so far:

• Trump talks his BS and takes some questions
• Pence thanks everybody and passes it to Birx
• Birx & Fauci gives the real important info

I cant see how it could be any worse than substantially more people dying from one disease every day than usually die from all other cases combined (For lombardy region, rest of italy was less contaminated at lockdown) and hospitals having to let 2 out of 3 people just die without actually treating them.

So my only guess is the model assumed a lombardy-type overload for all Italy and they managed to avoid it (barely) for now. Or they modeled cases in which case its tough to say how many are infected but not tested.

For the delivery services, how do they handle expiration dates? Do they pay attention to them at all? Or am I at the whim of the person selecting?

Stepped into town for the first time in 9 days for my yearly skin cancer checkup and felt suuuuper weird ... Really little traffic to the point i felt stupid waiting at red lights as a pedestrian where usually theres a continous line of cars. And every store still open (all offering mainly food/produce) has protective measurements like makeshift 'windo barriers' and customer limits. But i was the onky customer anyway at all 3 i went to.

I go outside a lot still (we have a "contact Prohibition" not a limit going outside per se) but since i work from home now i usually stay in my neighborhood which is usually not busy anyway. So this was really weird

To me the important numbers are the numbers of hospitalizations, number of people on intensive care and number that died. That's where the pressure on the hospitals is that must be contained. And even there, not every country has the same health system and/or the same capacity per x thousand people.

The other numbers (positive tests and recoveries) are like apples to oranges to grapes to bananas to pineapples to tomatoes to blueberries to ... (you get the point).

France had 350 deaths today as well up from 100 4 days ago ... They have a strict lockdown, but that will need at least another 2 weeks to make up for the high number of undetected cases (who all got locked in with healty people) and all the bad cases that were infected 2-3 weeks ago so i fear they reach Italy/Spain in a few days ... They barely tested and still dont test a ton last i checked so their number cant be taken seriously.

No idea. My assumption is there is usually a return mechanism in placee.

Here are some quotes from Birx at today's briefing.

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/...hnk/index.html

I don't trust Birx. She seems to be a little to on board the trump train.

Re: cruise lines and not being US companies. I don't know why Trump wants to let them now incorporate in the US to get aid since they've not been paying the taxes they would have been.

I know they hire a lot of US employees but wouldn't it be better to let them go bust and then have a company (US, Europe, Asia) buy them and then put it back together again?

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/...hnk/index.html

Yes, I can see that happening (whereas not with Fauci). Keep in mind she did say the "model" was not syncing up with reality on the ground and they were trying to figure it out.

Check out this animation of unemployment claims since 1967.

This took all of a week and a half to hit the fan.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeaut...ne_this_weeks/

.

[OC] To show just how insane this week's unemployment numbers are, I animated initial unemployment insurance claims from 1967 until now. These numbers are just astonishing. from r/dataisbeautiful

That 70% percent thing has been twisted around so much and i am a bit baffled someone like Birx is doing it as well. I understood that it is simply the number at which the virus would naturally go to an R0 rate of 1 or lower (each person infecting at most 1 other on average) due to enough immunity in the populace. I dont think it was ever intended to indicate this would happen continously and infect that number in a set amount of time, just that it would happen eventually if no one ever did sth about it.
much less 2-3 months ... And especially not now that contacts are limited (i mean, the sporting events and concerts alone are a Shit ton) people are quarantined etc and travel between states presumably limited (?). Which is the whole point why you do these things.

And it should be no surprise it hasn't been spreading everywhere equally as way less infected will ever have gone there or arrived from abroad (compared to say New York or California).

I think it is important to tell people things will be fine every once in a while, but can't help but feel it would be prudent right now to keep people alert when all current numbers merely reflect the Situation from 10 days ago,more for the deaths. I mean, even if only 10% get it that's 33 mio it would result in a lot of hospitalisations within a very short time frame.

You're a damn wizard pilotman!

Mikael Thalen on Twitter: "This shows the location data of phones that were on a Florida beach during Spring Break. It then shows where those phones traveled.

First thing you should note is the importance of social distancing. The second is how much data your phone gives off. https://t.co/iokUX3qjeB"

The video embedded in this tweet is fascinating.


EDIT: i'm used to Discord and Slack where a link to a tweet will show the contents in chat. How do you properly get this tweet to embed/show up here?

Yeah, I talked with my friend who recovered. He and his wife recovered on March 23 and began symptoms on around March 15. He said the tracking group was going to check again with his wife on March 30 (she was the only one tested). So, she wouldn't show up until next week on the "recovered" numbers.

I really think the fact that we are as spread out, we drive as many cars as we do and mass transit isn't as big is really helping the US hospitalization rates. It seems a lot easier for us to avoid being around people than places like Italy, Spain and France. I still think places like NY will get hit hard - but most of middle America may be able to spread things out better than Europe.

Yeah not buying it. Reports from New York and Atlanta are that we're almost there. Cuomo is talking about the whole ventilator-splitting procedure being necessary. I think it's irresponsible not to be talking about this while trying to prevent. Seems inevitable to some degree that this is going to be a thing.

That and I think that the rest of middle America and other towns are a solid 2-3 weeks behind NY in terms of infection spread. I hope your limited optimism bears out.

Will take another 2-3 weeks to see if they are merely delayed, depending on when they started social distancing measures. New York is just such a hub for visitors, makes sense it is the epicenter and ahead of the curve.

Even here there are big differences. F.e. the ones with more total and per capita cases can all be explained by lots of vacations in Italy and Austria (one of the big ski ressort areas is a Hotspot) and them having big carnival parades and event.
And now there is a clear south/west to north/east direction with it becoming less spread as you go north and east. With the exception of Berlin and Hamburg who attract a ton of visitors.

It is their job to make sure it is the case or assure them they are doing whatever necessary, not to assure them it is. I'd be livid if Merkel said that

Pet-peeve from my neighborhood: People who are walking their dogs off-leash during all of this are buttholes, for so many reasons.

I found this interesting and did a quick search to see how much testing had been done in each state. I found this from politico:

https://www.politico.com/interactive...-of-new-cases/

I assume her claim on "low rates" meant the number infected versus the number tested? If so, there might be a couple states that are trending to lower rates, but there are also quite a few of the ones she cited as under 200 cases that based on the numbers tested are running at similar rates with California (around 4% of the tests coming back positive). Maybe she is considering that low? Not sure what criteria she is using. There are also several states with relatively low number of positive cases (at least compared to New York) that are approaching a similar rate or even higher than New York (Georgia, Maryland, Arizona, Missouri, South Carolina, Arkansas, Delaware, etc.).

My conclusion would be that you can't read much into this, as the data is too inconsistent because the criteria for testing varies so much from state to state. Delaware for example has 130 positives in 166 tests. Based on the Birx conclusions, are we to assume that 78% of Delaware is infected? Seems kind of silly to me. I think the same can be said for the opposite end of the spectrum.

We've tested less than .2% of the population. We can't make any definitive statements based on that little data.

I agree. I’m going the other way than some others in that I think some places have had it for a while and social distancing is helping, but it is still spreading in a lot of places. The next 3-4 weeks will help make things a little clearer.

COVID-19 patients average time on ventilator: 11 - 21 days (vs. 3 - 4 days for non-COVID-19 patients). "We have patients that have been 20 days 30 days on a ventilator. The longer you are on a ventilator, the more likely you are not going get off a ventilator"

From the Cuomo presser aparently (via worldometer)

Just to illustrate why these beds fill up over time. And once they are full, people start dying in higher numbers because you can't treat everybody. It also shows why even if there are enough, it's not something to wish on anybody.

On Mon, CNN was reporting that US hit a milestone of more than 100+ deaths.
On Tue, CNN is reporting 163 deaths.
On Wed, CNN is reporting 216 deaths for total of 921

For Thu, I didn't find a daily mortality # so went to Foxnews which said 1,178 dead. Neither seem to be showing the daily count anymore.

So for Thu, 1178 - 921 = 257


Beats me what all this means but the mortality % increase is slowing from the very limited history so far. Doubt it means much at this time.