Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

If Napoleon had a B52....

 

That is fantasy land math. Use N95 masks over and over. Stop trying to make this so complicated. These Universities have money. Use it. I do like the BS though you tried to throw at the wall. Just didn’t stick.

 

Recommended usage is for 8 hours total per mask and not for re-use beyond that (also, you are supposed to immediately discard it after contact with potentially infected people). No faculty member is going to accept mass infection on campus with masks being used in a manner against its recommended usage. There is a reason nobody in the real world has done this, but keep pushing something nobody in a position of authority would ever do...

Recommended Guidance for Extended Use and Limited Reuse of N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirators in Healthcare Settings | NIOSH | CDC

 

Trump talking out of his bleep again. We had 40,000 more cases today. New Zealand had 9. They’ve had about 1,600 cases all year.

You want to know why we’re failing so spectacularly? Our leader has no clue what’s going on.

“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops! Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something. Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible, we don’t want that, but this is an invisible enemy that should never have been let to come to Europe and the rest of the world by China.”

That’s Trump today in Minnesota. He’s taking something he saw but didn’t really digest and shaping it into something it isn’t. Trump wants the world to be what he sees in his mind’s eye. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way and waiting for the virus to miraculously disappear isn’t a plan.

Nov 3rd save lives. Vote.

 

Got a warehouse full of masks somewhere? Front line hospitals and responders are still struggling to get N95 masks

 

Is a college classroom the same environment as a ‘healthcare setting’?

 

He knows it’s not. Just stoking fear. When I was at UF I was never within 6 feet of a professor unless I was handing an assignment or test in. Not sure why now it would be any different.

 

Gillette says I should change my razor every week but I make it last for 3-4 weeks. K95 masks are available everywhere if you can’t get an N95 mask. Keep making excuses for kids to not be in school.

 

If you load up an uncontrolled epidemic on campus, it functionally is. BTW, that recommendation is generalized for usage of N95s.

 

Okay, you know what? Your idea is brilliant and will save everything. I highly encourage you to seek out your closest major University President and tell him/her that you have figured out the problem that has been vexing literally tens of thousands of administrators for months: that all they need to do is find a huge number of N95 masks somewhere and then tell their thousands of employees to ignore CDC guidance on mask usage while you make them walk into a completely uncontrolled environment of virus spread. Let me know how it goes. We in the industry thank you in advance.

 

Well, considering Covid is as dangerous to college kids as the flu is then it should be an easy decision for college presidents. Problem is the MSM sees Covid makes them money so they will stoke the flames as long as they can. If presidents looked at the data and saw that students have nothing to worry about(roughly same odds as dying from the flu) then they would make different decisions in my opinion. But I know you would keep things closed down until there’s a vaccine.

 

Well thankfully this epidemic isnt uncontrolled. If masks and distancing are the recommended procedure then I am fine with classroom learning.
Otherwise everyone should just hide under a rock and wait?

 

Like I said, all you need to do is bring this brilliant idea to the closest University President. It is brilliant and has no meaningful holes at all. Every University President is wringing their hands about how to cut budgets if they have to lose a bunch of money again when some of the biggest expenses are people that can't be let go without cause. University Presidents are notoriously non-data driven, so make sure to tell them about your understanding of the data too. They absolutely haven't spent the last 5 months living and breathing this virus and its impacts on higher ed. But none of them have come up with your brilliant plan to tell their employees to ignore CDC guidelines and let the virus free on campus, so make sure to take it to them. Sooner the better. Try it tomorrow. Again, let me know how it goes.

 

In the US, it is pretty uncontrolled and he is asking for even less control on college campuses. UNC made the call today that I suspect a lot of colleges will make over the next month as they open. Or to share the reaction of a good friend and colleague at another University opening this week:

 

Its not ‘pretty uncontrolled’. could we have done better, sure. But we are seeing numbers decline for the most part. To me thats controlling it. Could it be better, again sure but to pretend its an out of control wildfire doesn’t jibe with the numbers. There is hope.

 

Yeah, we have a 7-day average of over 50K detected cases per day or about 1/4 of all detected cases in the world. If that is control, I would hate to see out of control.

 

Is that moving average increasing or decreasing over prior periods?

 

It is much higher than it was every day prior to July 4 and lower than it was since then. But when you have 50K getting the disease each day, it isn't under control.

 

Yeah we gotta do better. Masks and distancing dont seem to help?

 

Cases are down 18% over the previous 2 weeks. That’s a good trend.