Handsome Ralph posted:

Everything Amazon sells and ships directly will still be sold and shipped. If they have something in stock right now, they'll still likely ship it out to you. It's the "Sold by X and fulfilled by Amazon" stuff that is getting temporarily halted.

Shaocaholica posted:

I stocked up on bats and pangolins before the got banned.

Hopper posted:

Regarding lasting changes in society, now would be the ideal time to take all the money allocated to bail out companies and instead pay a universal income of 1000€ (or equivalent as appropriate per country) to everyone.

I know not will never happen but propping up all those unstable companies nobody really needs with so much money is ridiculous.

Blorange posted:

Amazon isn't shutting down, they're clearing their distribution centers of anything that isn't groceries and toiletries.

Blorange posted:

Amazon isn't shutting down, they're clearing their distribution centers of anything that isn't groceries and toiletries.

Louisgod posted:

I rarely ever drink these days (think the last time I had whiskey was like a month ago?) but I feel compelled to hit up the liquor store to get a few bottles.

Mnoba posted:

the bodies aren't even cold yet, how about you take your lovely unproven socialist pipe dreams and go somewhere else where they might be appreciated

WEH posted:

All the theater chains in my area are closed except for one small chain, which are refusing to even cut attendance to 50% because “they believe access to entertainment is important in times like these” or some poo poo. Naturally people are flocking to them and I’m sure nothing bad will come of it

Day Man posted:

gently caress you. gently caress you. gently caress you.

frogge posted:

If your state government made a mandate about banning gatherings of certain group sizes you should seriously consider alerting your local police and/or health department. While the folks flouting the social distancing measures going there deserve to get it, the other people they may come into contact with do not.

quote:

In her long life, Nana remembers many examples of self-quarantine and medical isolation.
It's fascinating to me that the current situation isn't without precedent, but we're so un-used to it, because of the advances in vaccines and antibiotics that have occurred over her lifetime. Nana is 94.
When Margrét was a kid, she and her sister went to visit relatives in the country. While the girls were away, their dad came down with Scarlet Fever. He was taken to isolation in the hospital, and her mom was instructed to self-quarantine and monitor herself. She couldn't go out for over a week. Every day, her best friend came to the driveway with her morning coffee, and Nana's mother came to the window with her morning coffee. Her friend knew it would be hard to be alone, not knowing how her husband is doing, and gave her that moral support with social distancing from the safety of the driveway. After the self-quarantine was up, public health officials decided what personal effects had to be burned, and smoked each room to sterilize them.
Another time, Margrét was walking down the street, and she saw the happy children in the hospital. She wished she could play with them, and didn't know they were recovering from Polio. She threw her balloon up to them, and they caught it, and threw it back. A neighbor saw this and called her father, who took away the balloon and decontaminated her before she could enter the house.
When she was a young adult, she had a good friend, Steiny, who was a tenant of her parents', and later, a waiter at the ski club. All the family was fond of him. One night, he came down to Reykjavik from the country very ill, and asked if he could stay until the doctor was available in the morning. Of course, Nana's parents gave him their daughters' room. The girls came home and were met at the door by neighbors. They were not to go in the room. The next day he went to the hospital, and was diagnosed with Polio. The house was smoked a second time. The young man lost use of his right arm but otherwise recovered.
Every time she exited and entered the US, she had to prove she had been vaccinated for Smallpox. She didn't get sick the first few times she got the vaccine, but eventually she did feel a little I'll. Still better than getting smallpox.
Her good friend Hannah was denied entry to the US because she had been cured of tuberculosis. That's right. In the 1950's, having ever had it was considered dangerous, even if you were cured. After five years in Canada, Hannah was granted entry.
And most of all Nana remembers the outbreak of Polio in Massachusetts when her sons were babies, and the fear for her children. 1100 died in Boston, 6 in Westborough, 2 in Hopkinton. It was so close, but her sick kids luckily did not have it.
Health classes taught about TB, Diphtheria, Measles, Polio. The symptoms, the isolation, when to go to the hospital. If she saw someone cough and spit on the sidewalk, she covered her face and held her breath, because she knew if she breathed in the TB, it would be in her lungs too. It was a scary time, but she doesn't remember an epidemic like today's where whole towns and countries quarantined. Spanish Flu would be the closest, and that was before her time.

poverty goat posted:

I don't really drink either but as a hurricane veteran I know it's critical for any slow-burning disaster

Disco Pope posted:

Do we get to skip one in 2021 since we're on our second?

Ornamental Dingbat posted:

100,000! WE DID IT BABY!

I said come in! posted:

No, you'll probably be asked to help patients who might have COVID-19.

sweet thursday posted:

What if pango titty milk is really sweet and tasty

Ornamental Dingbat posted:

11 days ago. Looks like we'll hit 200,000 in the next day.

quote:

In Cornwall, 79-year-old Dulcie Williams will meet her son, grandson and great-granddaughter for a cream tea on Wednesday. “I haven’t yet decided if I will keep to full self-isolation,” she said. “I might well find that life is no longer worth living if I can’t see my loved ones. I hear what the government are saying that that’s a decision for me to take when the time comes.”

numberoneposter posted:

imagine the upcoming deep discounts on estate sale corvettes

I said come in! posted:

stab posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/us/kentucky-refused-quarantine-coronavirus-trnd/index.html


MUH FREEDOMS

quote:

Even at their most effective – and draconian – containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

About 35 companies and academic institutions are racing to create such a vaccine, at least four of which already have candidates they have been testing in animals. The first of these – produced by Boston-based biotech firm Moderna – will enter human trials in April.

This unprecedented speed is thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. China shared that sequence in early January, allowing research groups around the world to grow the live virus and study how it invades human cells and makes people sick.

But there is another reason for the head start. Though nobody could have predicted that the next infectious disease to threaten the globe would be caused by a coronavirus – flu is generally considered to pose the greatest pandemic risk – vaccinologists had hedged their bets by working on “prototype” pathogens. “The speed with which we have [produced these candidates] builds very much on the investment in understanding how to develop vaccines for other coronaviruses,” says Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Oslo-based nonprofit the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which is leading efforts to finance and coordinate Covid-19 vaccine development.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained. One company, Maryland-based Novavax, has now repurposed those vaccines for Sars-CoV-2, and says it has several candidates ready to enter human trials this spring. Moderna, meanwhile, built on earlier work on the Mers virus conducted at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.

Sars-CoV-2 shares between 80% and 90% of its genetic material with the virus that caused Sars – hence its name. Both consist of a strip of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside a spherical protein capsule that is covered in spikes. The spikes lock on to receptors on the surface of cells lining the human lung – the same type of receptor in both cases – allowing the virus to break into the cell. Once inside, it hijacks the cell’s reproductive machinery to produce more copies of itself, before breaking out of the cell again and killing it in the process.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Traditionally, immunisation has been achieved using live, weakened forms of the virus, or part or whole of the virus once it has been inactivated by heat or chemicals. These methods have drawbacks. The live form can continue to evolve in the host, for example, potentially recapturing some of its virulence and making the recipient sick, while higher or repeat doses of the inactivated virus are required to achieve the necessary degree of protection. Some of the Covid-19 vaccine projects are using these tried-and-tested approaches, but others are using newer technology. One more recent strategy – the one that Novavax is using, for example – constructs a “recombinant” vaccine. This involves extracting the genetic code for the protein spike on the surface of Sars-CoV-2, which is the part of the virus most likely to provoke an immune reaction in humans, and pasting it into the genome of a bacterium or yeast – forcing these microorganisms to churn out large quantities of the protein. Other approaches, even newer, bypass the protein and build vaccines from the genetic instruction itself. This is the case for Moderna and another Boston company, CureVac, both of which are building Covid-19 vaccines out of messenger RNA.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. “Our experience with vaccine development is that you can’t anticipate where you’re going to stumble,” says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

Clinical trials, an essential precursor to regulatory approval, usually take place in three phases. The first, involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects. The second, involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and the third does the same in several thousand people. But there’s a high level of attrition as experimental vaccines pass through these phases. “Not all horses that leave the starting gate will finish the race,” says Bruce Gellin, who runs the global immunisation programme for the Washington DC-based nonprofit, the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and is collaborating with Cepi over a Covid-19 vaccine.

There are good reasons for that. Either the candidates are unsafe, or they’re ineffective, or both. Screening out duds is essential, which is why clinical trials can’t be skipped or hurried. Approval can be accelerated if regulators have approved similar products before. The annual flu vaccine, for example, is the product of a well-honed assembly line in which only one or a few modules have to be updated each year. In contrast, Sars-CoV-2 is a novel pathogen in humans, and many of the technologies being used to build vaccines are relatively untested too. No vaccine made from genetic material – RNA or DNA – has been approved to date, for example. So the Covid-19 vaccine candidates have to be treated as brand new vaccines, and as Gellin says: “While there is a push to do things as fast as possible, it’s really important not to take shortcuts.”

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

It’s for these reasons that taking a vaccine candidate all the way to regulatory approval typically takes a decade or more, and why President Trump sowed confusion when, at a meeting at the White House on 2 March, he pressed for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections in November – an impossible deadline. “Like most vaccinologists, I don’t think this vaccine will be ready before 18 months,” says Annelies Wilder-Smith, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That’s already extremely fast, and it assumes there will be no hitches.

In the meantime, there is another potential problem. As soon as a vaccine is approved, it’s going to be needed in vast quantities – and many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply don’t have the necessary production capacity. Vaccine development is already a risky affair, in business terms, because so few candidates get anywhere near the clinic. Production facilities tend to be tailored to specific vaccines, and scaling these up when you don’t yet know if your product will succeed is not commercially feasible. Cepi and similar organisations exist to shoulder some of the risk, keeping companies incentivised to develop much-needed vaccines. Cepi plans to invest in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and boosting manufacturing capacity in parallel, and earlier this month it put out a call for $2bn to allow it to do so.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. “Getting a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what’s needed for a global immunisation programme,” says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). “Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation.”
Donald Trump at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center in Maryland, 3 March. The president sowed confusion by pressing for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections.

The problem is making sure the vaccine gets to all those who need it. This is a challenge even within countries, and some have worked out guidelines. In the scenario of a flu pandemic, for example, the UK would prioritise vaccinating healthcare and social care workers, along with those considered at highest medical risk – including children and pregnant women – with the overall goal of keeping sickness and death ra tes as low as possible. But in a pandemic, countries also have to compete with each other for medicines.

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India – a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world – not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

Outside of pandemics, the WHO brings governments, charitable foundations and vaccine-makers together to agree an equitable global distribution strategy, and organisations like Gavi, the vaccine alliance, have come up with innovative funding mechanisms to raise money on the markets for ensuring supply to poorer countries. But each pandemic is different, and no country is bound by any arrangement the WHO proposes – leaving many unknowns. As Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, points out: “The question is, what will happen in a situation where you’ve got national emergencies going on?”

This is being debated, but it will be a while before we see how it plays out. The pandemic, says Wilder-Smith, “will probably have peaked and declined before a vaccine is available”. A vaccine could still save many lives, especially if the virus becomes endemic or perennially circulating – like flu – and there are further, possibly seasonal, outbreaks. But until then, our best hope is to contain the disease as far as possible. To repeat the sage advice: wash your hands.

Frank Frank posted:

The original version of this image had the company's phone number on it. I bet they've had an interesting day.

Drunk Nerds posted:

I miss hanging out with groups of adults. That was an easy way to charge my emotional battery. Now that I can't do it, I'm expecting to get depression one of these days.

At least I have goons to talk to.

mrfart posted:

Well, Belgium is going in some sort of lockdown.
Only allowed outside to buy food/see doctor or work.
Groups of people other than families are no longer allowed.
I hope people don't loose their poo poo in supermarkets tomorrow.

Adolf Glitter posted:

Their Facebook, Linked in and review site pages are all down, and if you type their name into google it auto-fills "corona virus" at the end.
The are done