Things are very different from one place to another. In one part of one country it can be cutting everybody’s life expectancy in half, while somewhere else it seems plausible to compare it to the flu. Intuition is useless but the numbers don’t feel real either.
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Not necessarily. The local effects that COVID-19 turns off are the part of the immune response that slows down the virus factories of infected cells. The antibody reaction is unaffected, which leads to inflammation, which is why it hits the lungs so hard. The lungs don’t do their job well when inflamed. But the rest of the chain is just fine. We want the killer T cells to deploy, because they are the virus assassins.
So when it comes to people with immunocompromise, it depends very much on how they are compromised. People who have a slowed inflammatory response may actually fare better than the general public, as long as they have the attack cells to eliminate the virus. But people who have low white cell counts due to bone marrow disease or chemo could be in big trouble. They could still get the cytokine storm, but without as much response by the cells that attack and dispose of the virus.
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I kind of meant numbers overall, but I get your point. It’s different everywhere, worldwide, country to country and from city to city.
Literally mind-boggling.
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I have a story to tell. First off let me start by saying you might want to avoid ordering food online that requires it to be shipped with dry ice.
Several weeks ago my mom ordered cookie dough off of QVC. Enough to make over a 100 cookies but she canceled that order the same day. Even after it was canceled it still showed up for some odd reason. When my folks opened it up the dry ice was completely evaporated and the dough was at room temperature. Turns out the company only packed enough enough ice to barely last 4 days and that package was bouncing around different UPS facilities for 6 to 7 days. Since pretty much everybody has been hitting the shipping systems for household essentials and a lot employees are worried about getting sick, there’s been more shipping errors and delays lately. Luckily the folks at the cookie company asked them to throw out the cookie dough out of food poisoning concerns and assured them them they never charged for the dough.
So whatever you do, don’t order fresh fish from Alaska that has to be shipped with dry ice through UPS or FedEx.
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Pretty good article in Variety about what my local drive-in had to go through when it comes to tickets and sanitation
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Dont call it a comeback. They’ve been here for years.
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No way to really answer that in detail, but broadly, it appears (early, preliminary data, absolutely not gospel) that the virus is able to turn off the cell’s ability to make interferon, which compromises the cell’s “self-defense.” At the same time, it activated the inflammatory cascades resulting in out of control damage inflicted by the immune system itself. Thing is, small details matter. Rube Goldberg could never have come up with a more convoluted, intricate and hard as fuck to understand system as our immune system. And those details are still unknown. So, long story short, we still do not know.
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Yup, still doesnt work. Damn, you would not think there were that many anti-Trump scientists out there!
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Smallpox blankets, redux:
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Totally agree with that second one:
This Ben Jennings piece on Britain’s plan to re-open elementary schools takes a second and then, once you see it, becomes brilliant.
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This story is probably gonna give Trump a bad idea
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We’re going to have to change the meme to “Georgia Man”, since all the Florida men are going to be dead in a few more months.
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Twitter thread about a japanese news program trying to make young people look bad by using old footage to make them look like they’re ignoring quarantine rules and the stunt utterly falling flat on their faces
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