Recent content by Bootstoots

My GF tested negative. Back to work tomorrow.

Thanks. I might not even be sick, though - either from not having the virus at all (ballpark 50% chance) or ending up almost asymptomatic. That's the weirdest part right now.

The main COVID-19 thread moves quickly and is mostly focused on the disease in general. I'm starting this thread to discuss people's personal experiences with getting the virus and/or suffering financially because of the recession. A week ago, I posted: This coworker and one other one were...

My GF is a counselor at a women's prison. She has a bunch of coworkers with her in the same relatively small room, up to 13 at a time. Yesterday, a coworker who is simultaneously a know-it-all and an idiot was coughing repeatedly while insisting it was just allergies. Last night, she went to...

It's the lysis buffer! Thanks, I was wondering what the bottleneck was. All the news reports just mentioned shortages of unspecified reagents. Yesterday I looked up RT-PCR test kits from Sigma Aldrich and noticed the same issue - the individual reagents weren't being sold separately, instead a...

I'll tell you the first thing that jumped out at me. It should jump out at you too, if you think about it. Early in this video, he says that only 5000 people have died. He happens to be telling the truth as of the time the video posted on March 14: the number of deaths by the end of the day on...

Just checked the newest data here. Italy has seen two straight days of decline in new cases now. After a peak of 6557 new cases on 3/21, there were 5560 cases on 3/22 and 4789 on 3/23. Hopefully they're starting to turn the corner. The thing that's odd to me, though, is that the number of...

For some reason I thought the lockdown had started sooner, around March 1 or 2 instead of March 9 when it actually occurred. I found an article showing cases in Lodi (locked down Feb 24) vs Bergamo (no lockdown until Mar 9), In Lodi, the lockdown seems to have reduced R0 to approximately 1, with...

After appearing to level off for a few days around 3/15, Italian cases have resumed their exponential climb. The doubling time is about 4.5 days starting at 3/16. Hopefully this has more to do with new testing than with exponential spread continuing after the lockdown began. If the rate of...

Temperamentally, I'm the kind to downplay threats and inwardly laugh at people who overreact. But this threat is actually not only very serious but requires an extremely rapid and drastic reaction to keep the number of deaths as low as possible. Failure to react aggressively enough will kill...

He'll probably hide it as long as he can, perhaps ending in a situation like that of the Iranian official who was seen coughing and rubbing his brow on national TV while trying to downplay the crisis. Alternately, and more likely, it will leak from someone and he'll try to deny it for about a...

Medium is a site that has all sorts of stuff of all sorts of levels of trustworthiness. But this article looks extremely good and well-researched: it fits with everything else I know from the available data about how cases have slowed down dramatically in places that implement restrictions, with...

It is encouraging that SARS was eliminated despite ~8000 known cases, so maybe a couple tens of thousands of total cases if some of them were not as severe. Affected areas did put in place quarantines, restrictions on gatherings, and other public health measures, which reduced its basic...

His veto would be overridden with a 2/3 majority of both houses. He has 10 days to sit on the bill as well. If Congress is not in session (e.g. in recess because of all the old infected politicians) at the end of those 10 days, he could "pocket veto" it by refusing to do anything, killing it...

I'm not going to do it, but not for that reason either - more just because I'm not morally willing to steal from my employer and profit from said theft. I'm confident enough in avoiding legal trouble that I'd think the risk would be worth it, simply because of the large volume of people doing...