From the article: At least seven Pub employees also tested people positive for COVID-19 after the owner had them tested as a precaution. The owners says all seven who tested positive worked June 6 but believes a customer was the one who initially brought the virus in.
To be filed under: "Pathetic Attempt at Distancing"
Yup.
Island backwateryness pays off sometimes. Apart from the collapsed tourism industry, weâre almost back to normal here.
Heâs not going to do a fucking thing, that would require leadership, but at least heâs getting a little bit out of the way.
Unfortunately, Pima County as a whole is more conservative than Tucson proper, with at least one certifiable lunatic Trumpie supervisor (she thinks there are people hiding in the walls of the county building listening in on her conversations).
Update: City of Tucson and Pima County seem likely to pass mask ordinances. Fingers crossed.
A rant (published prior to Duceyâs spineless, un-jebus-loving Covid-cuckery):
Let me just throw some numbers at you. When Ducey issued a week-long curfew on the state because some windows got broken and dumpsters set on fire in the wake of the George Floyd protests, I noted that 900 people had died of coronavirus in Arizona.
Since then, 250 more people have been killed by the virus in the state and Ducey promises no new restrictions. How this isnât an impeachable offense is beyond me.
France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain have a combined population of about 325 million â roughly the size of the United States â and their most recent combined new coronavirus cases add up to 1,209.
Arizonaâs 1,233 confirmed cases Sunday were more than than those of five substantial countries combined.
What is it like to have leaders? Have I ever known?
Then there was this horrifying passage in the Arizona Mirror as reported from the reliably deadpan Jeremy Duda.
At one point, (Dr. Cara) Christ acknowledged there was little else the state would do besides an educational campaign aimed at improving hygiene, physical distancing and encouraging the use of masks.
âWe know that itâs in the community, and that we canât stop the spread. We canât stop living, as well,â she said.
Stop right there. OK, Cara. You say you are a doctor. Whatâs it called when people âstop livingâ? Itâs happened 1,100 times to people across Arizona. Itâs called âdyingâ and if the governor shrugs it off, pretend the George Floyd protesters were killing 100 white people a week.
âWe canât stop living!â Wow. Just wow.
In a perfect closing contrast, I point you toward the big red stripe across the southern Santa Catalina Mountains. Fire crews slurry-bombed the hell out of the mountains to stop wildfires from engulfing pricey neighborhoods. The government â coordinated among federal, state and local authorities â took quick, decisive, expensive action, and kept increasing the manpower and resources put into the fight against the Bighorn Fire. No one suggested the fire would âjust stop.â But hey, in Arizona we care more about Foothills dream homes than the lives in the city below.
(And if you are curious about that.)
In one section, Pence, whom President Donald Trump appointed in late February to lead the White Houseâs coronavirus task force, praised all 50 states for beginning to reopen in a âsafe and responsible manner.â
But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lead infectious disease expert on the task force, suggested that isnât the case during an interview with NPR earlier Tuesday.
Thatâs not going to end well.
The contradicting statements serve as an example of the distance between the propaganda pushed by the White House and some of the warnings raised by Fauci and other public health experts.
In his nearly 800-word piece, Pence accused the press of âfear mongeringâ in its coverage of the pandemic and dubbed the nationâs response to the virus âa success.â
Yep, I hear you.
Saw this and though I have long admired much about Virginiaâa beautiful chunk of land indeedâI canât imagine what you are truly up against.
Unreal. Virginia. SMDH⌠
Copy that. Same goes with my friends who are doctors in Texas.
They have to keep things buttoned up pretty tight on the outside. So many of us are in our work lives, in the parts of Texas that arenât Austin, Houston, El Paso, San Antonio.
May they and their allies have a smooth, efficient time at their polling places, free of âirregularitiesâ and engineered disenfranchisements.
I bet you do. And water them well.
Keep breathinâ
Godspeed
and thank you for your work.
Although full trial data have not yet been released, several outside commentators hailed the result as a âbreakthrough.â
If that falls flat of itâs promise, Iâm going to be angry for a long time. I might not forgive that. Ever.
But [Bhadelia] and others expressed disappointment that the Recovery team did not release additional information.
Disappointed is not exactly what I am.
Landray acknowledges the criticism. âI fully understand why scientists want to see the details. Iâm a scientist, I want to see the details.â But with thousands of people dying of COVID-19 every day, it was important to get the basic message out first, he says. âThere is this tension between having the final details and the final decimal points nailed down, and having what is actually a clear-cut and practical message in the public domain.â
âThe decimal points might change a bit when we tidy things up, but weâve got to a point where the message will not change,â Landray says, adding that Recovery hopes to make public the full data within about 10 days.
I donât really get it, but they seem confident enough.
Again, if this falls flat⌠My goodness.
Also, please employ some data wranglers during data collection. Iâm basically doing âclean up messy data from other peopleâ for a living, I know what I am talking about. Youâve got hygenicists at hospitals nowadays. Get someone for data hygiene as well. Please.
Oops, I did it again. Shouting at the world in general and researchers in particular on an online forum. So helpful, innit?
To end on a positive note: Kai Kupferschmidt is worth following. Highly recommended. One of the best German-speaking science journalists I know.
ETA, which deserves another post: there is one thing I want to highlight.
In regard to my former post
Well, I should have shut the fuck up with my snark.
Landray says, they stuck to their plan to wait until 2000 patients had received a treatment and 4000 patients had enrolled in a control arm
in Spanish hospitals, [âŚ] recruitment into the placebo group was slow because most patients were given [steroids]
[Disclaimer: edited the last bit from âthe steroidâ to âsteroidsâ to widen the scope.]
Because medical professionals tried to save patients lives, they of course tried various corticosteroids. Of course they did. Then came along some people who wanted to see whatâs effective, and what is not. And of course they could not see the signal, since a control group was missing.
Thatâs the problem with a lot of real-life data, as opposed to controlled study designs. You often cannot see what your are looking for, because of oh so so many confounding factors.
The priority in medical care is to help. Not the science. Not even how and why it helps.
I really need to keep that in mind when reading papers right now and getting angry about flaws or questions not answered which I find obvious. Most papers are oh so very short, they cannot report the circumstances, background, and limitations. (TBH, I am of the opinion it is very much disincentivised to really discuss limitations and shortfalls in your papers. Other discussion).
Also:
This virus is new.
This illness is new.
We donât know shit.
But we are learning. As fast as possible. As humanity, I have to say this is the biggest moonshot. Ever.
Until the climate change caused by global warming really hits.
For those no longer paying attention to such old news, over at Worldometer, the running 7 day average of new cases (the 7 day average is the only way to drag meaningful data out of the noise) has taken a sudden turn to increase after being fairly flat for the last month or more, and the death curve, which had been on a significant downslope has now leveled off and is flat. This is not good news, folks, and with the âGrand Reopeningâ now in full swing, it will get much much worse.
Can we contact trace for âgenerally repulsiveâ?
I wonder how many of those people are going to get sick or make their family members sick?
I wouldnât call it âflatâ but it may be hundreds per day all summer, and then there is Wave 2
