Coronavirus positive ... news

[beyelzu]

Restaurant sells really nice bottle of Pappy (25 year old Rip Van Winkle bourbon) for 20k. A guy buys it for 40 to help them and add it to his bourbon collection.

Once the crisis ends and the Datz Restaurant Group comes out on the other side, Suzanne Perry said she will make sure she repays the bourbon buyer for his kindness.
"There are causes that he cares about deeply, causes that are really near and dear to his heart and I will support him in the form of catering events. I will promote them, I'll do whatever I can," Suzanne Perry said. "What he has done for me is going to come back to him a hundred times."

I dig the idea of paying it forward as well. We are all in this together.


Florida veteran buys $20K bottle of bourbon for $40K to help restaurant stay afloat during coronavirus crisis - CNN

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

On a smaller scale for the rest of us plebs, buying gift certificates from local business if they sell them is a good way to give them liquidity now, and yourself stuff later. Make peace with the idea you may not get to use the certificate.

[beyelzu]

Also we can buy stamps and not use them to help the post office. I mean just purchasing them and using them later would also help.

[JoeP]

Coronavirus: Army veteran Tom Moore, 99, raises £4m for NHS - BBC News

A 99-year-old army veteran who has raised more than £4m to help the NHS in the fight against Covid-19 has vowed to keep going even though he has smashed his original £1,000 target.

Tom Moore aimed to complete 100 laps of his Bedfordshire garden by Thursday, walking with the aid of a frame.

However he has now said he will not stop and hopes to do another 100.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

That makes my heart sing

Here is an interesting thread going into detail about the whole thing. (just read the thread, I think the article looking thing is just a donation to WISDEM thing)

THREAD: Democracy won in Wisconsin tonight. The GOP thought they had this election fully stolen. Trump leaned in personally. But voters, who don't like being suppressed, rose up. Organizers worked magic. Here's the story. (Also: donate! https://t.co/oRwfVzkXr3)

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) April 14, 2020

Fuck the GOP. Fuck them all.

Me too. Not for Wisconsin itself, but for the failure to suppress voters . So much so I am cross-replying in this thrad.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Coronavirus: Army veteran Tom Moore, 99, raises £4m for NHS - BBC News

Coronavirus: Capt Tom Moore finishes NHS fundraiser as it tops £13m - BBC News

Video of the final few metres

[SR71]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLJ8ILIE780

[JoeP]

Finland to increase WHO funding | Yle Uutiset | yle.fi

The move came after US President Donald Trump said he would cut American funding for the organisation.

The Finnish government agreed together with the World Health Organization (WHO) to restore Finnish funding to 2015 levels, which equals 5.5 million euros, the government confirmed on Wednesday.

The total Finnish funding is now about 1.5% of the withdrawn US funding of 400 million dollars.

[JoeP]

A Boeing 767 from Icelandair has drawn a big heart over Reykjavik in Iceland, on arrival from China with medical supplieshttps://t.co/KzbjFK1Iqe pic.twitter.com/97Dlp5eynE

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) April 19, 2020

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Coronavirus: Capt Tom Moore finishes NHS fundraiser as it tops £13m - BBC News

Captain Tom Moore becomes oldest artist to claim UK No 1 single | Music | The Guardian

I have not listened to the song to confirm that the song itself is positive news.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Captain Tom Moore becomes oldest artist to claim UK No 1 single | Music | The Guardian

I have not listened to the song to confirm that the song itself is positive news.

Captain Tom promoted to colonel on 100th birthday in flood of cards | UK news | The Guardian

Opportunity missed to make him Major Tom but still.

Happy 100th birthday Colonel Tom!

[beyelzu]

The Cuebiq data suggests that behavioral changes were largely driven by people making a voluntary choice to stay home rather than being forced to do so by a state-sanctioned stay-at-home order. One need only look at the behavior of residents in North Carolina and their neighbors in South Carolina: While North Carolina issued a stay-at-home order eight days before South Carolina, a stabilized number of people in both states started staying at home about a week before North Carolina’s order.

Americans Didn’t Wait For Their Governors To Tell Them To Stay Home Because Of COVID-19

that is good news, but that was also before the rightwing propaganda machine started kicking. Hopefully people keep taking this shit seriously.

But it is pretty cool that they are thus far.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I read somewhere, I think it might have been about the 1918 flu, the areas that did the best during and after were the places that had the strongest social solidarity. What we might be seeing there is people in the Carolinas acting like they gonna act. That nifty graph map looks like it was pretty much nation wide.

[JoeP]

If defying social distancing orders were really a political statement, you’d think that the southeast would be a hotbed for dissent. Yet people in the six states we examined changed their behavior around mid-March, before the states’ official stay-at-home orders. In fact, about 90 percent of the total change between early March and mid-April had occurred in the week before the stay-at-home orders were passed in each state.

That’s more or less in line with the country at large, as you can see in the chart below.

What this suggests to me is that a majority - maybe even 90% - of the country are pretty sensible despite their politics. All the noise in the various media is the extremes and the activists trying to shift the tiny amount of waverers and of course the political discourse.

[SR71]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

Americans Didn’t Wait For Their Governors To Tell Them To Stay Home Because Of COVID-19

that is good news, but that was also before the rightwing propaganda machine started kicking. Hopefully people keep taking this shit seriously.

But it is pretty cool that they are thus far.

We have a sandwich and ice cream stand at a farmers market and that was our experience. The crowd two weeks before the official order was already pretty thin, and the week before the announcement nearly nonexistent. We're still under orders to stay home. I have noticed a lot of people driving lately, but I'm not sure that they aren't just taking a spin out of boredom. It's been on my mind though, wondering what they're up to.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by SR71

I have noticed a lot of people driving lately, but I'm not sure that they aren't just taking a spin out of boredom. It's been on my mind though, wondering what they're up to.

Should take a car out for a spin anyway every so often. At least run the engine.

[beyelzu]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Should take a car out for a spin anyway every so often. At least run the engine.

Yeah otherwise you start getting those annoying text messages from your gps car alarm when the short slowly drains your battery until your racing distributor won’t fire and it takes a jumpbox to get Chandra started at the grocery store.

[viscousmemories]

I don't miss the car payment, insurance and parking fees, but under these quarantine circumstances I do miss having a car. No way in hell I'm getting on a bus or even in a Lyft at this point in time.

[beyelzu]

Necessity has always been the mother of invention

Remember, early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, the speculation as to how apocalyptic it would be if this disease hit the African continent? I do. There was deep anxiety about what it would mean for countries with lower income populations, dominant but harder-to-regulate informal economies and far fewer healthcare facilities than the UK or Italy.

Yep, I do remember and I shared the concerns.

Senegal is in a good position because its Covid-19 response planning began in earnest in January, as soon as the first international alert on the virus went out. The government closed the borders, initiated a comprehensive plan of contact tracing and, because it is a nation of multiple-occupation households, offered a bed for every single coronavirus patient in either a hospital or a community health facility.

As a result, this nation of 16 million people has had only 30 deaths. Each death has been acknowledged individually by the government, and condolences paid to the family. You can afford to see each death as a person when the numbers are at this level. At every single one of those stages, the UK did the opposite, and is now facing a death toll of more than 35,000.

Getting started in January? What a crazy concept!

Ghana, with a population of 30 million, has a similar death toll to Senegal, partly because of an extensive system of contact tracing, utilising a large number of community health workers and volunteers, and other innovative techniques such as “pool testing”, in which multiple blood samples are tested and then followed up as individual tests only if a positive result is found. The advantages in this approach are now being studied by the World Health Organization.

It wouldn’t occur to me, but it’s genius if you are worried about control of the disease in a population with a low incidence especially.

Across the African continent, the lack of access to expensive pharmaceutical products, not to mention a well-founded historic lack of trust, has fuelled interest in whether traditional herbal remedies have anything to offer. One plant in particular – Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, which belongs to the daisy family – is drawing particular attention after the president of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina, claimed it was a “cure” for Covid-19.

That may sound Trumpian, and the WHO has cautioned that further trials are needed before it can be advocated as a treatment for the disease. But I contacted the respected Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany, which is currently conducting clinical trials on a different breed of the same plant, in this case grown in Kentucky.

Yeah, that does sound Trumpian, but like the Madagascar Academy of Medicine, Id like to see it studied.

This just mentions a few countries and we don’t have good useable stats for Africa, but I appreciate the perspective and the good news.

[JoeP]

Also on Africa, in particular the success of Ghana:

The smouldering pandemic - Why covid-19 seems to spread more slowly in Africa | Middle East & Africa | The Economist

Not sure if this article is free to read - even registering with an email address is not free as in freedom.

But y'all can at least see the opening

Last month a worker at a fish factory in Tema, a port city in Ghana, infected 533 people with the virus behind covid-19. President Nana Akufo-Addo linked the “super-spreader” to about 10% of the country’s 5,408 cases.

That Ghana could identify the person is a tribute to its response.

533 people

Later:

Another sign of undercounting is the share of covid-19 tests coming back positive. The “test-positivity-rate” is an imperfect guide. But assuming those being tested have covid-like symptoms, a rate above 5-10% suggests there are many uncounted cases, says Jason Andrews of Stanford University. At least 22 African countries have rates above 10%, including Algeria (91%), Sudan (87%) and Tanzania (78%).

John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president, does not believe his country’s results. “We only see them releasing positive, positive, positive results,” he said. He claims that the national laboratory was sent papaya, goat and sheep samples that tested positive. (The lab denies this.) No new official data have been released since April 29th.

I'm guessing the lab results are sound and Mr Magufuli is trying to bend the truth.

Crucial in slowing the early spread of covid-19 was the swift introduction of containment measures. Most African countries implemented lockdowns far earlier than rich countries did.

Good...

it takes into account the fact that Africans travel less, thanks to sparse road networks.

Not really a policy success.

[lisarea]

That "cereal bar" restaurant by here, which served bowls of cold cereal with milk, just announced they've gone out of business.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[SR71]

Originally Posted by lisarea

That "cereal bar" restaurant by here, which served bowls of cold cereal with milk, just announced they've gone out of business.

This is what happens when the cold cereal restaurants omit the vending of the hot oatsmeals.