I completely understand the position of the other teams and I really hope the NCAA proceeds with the tournament. The players are on the court and have been playing games as recently as Saturday/Sunday. I haven’t heard of a student athlete contracting the virus. If fans choose to attend, that’s up to them. People are still choosing to fly and attend concerts, large church services etc. The risk is still low, and definitely precautions need to be taken, but I can understand the position of the other Ivy teams who no longer have a chance to make the NCAA tournament.
While the Army last week announced that it would not be sending troops back stateside for permanent change-of-station moves from South Korea or Italy until further notice, senior Pentagon officials confirmed Tuesday that the Defense Department is working on a policy for the entire military in the face of the spreading coronavirus.
That includes both PCS moves out of COVI-19 hotspots, as well as into them, and potentially policies restricting deployments into other parts of the world.
Spring and summer are also a big time for international military exercises. Some based in South Korea have been canceled, while Defender Europe 2020 is still on. Operation African Lion has been limited, Hoffman said, in Morocco and Tunisia…
One containment option is the Navy’s current procedure for sailors on deployment, putting 14 days in between port calls and restricting underways to at least 14 days, so that any symptoms will pop up before a ship returns home again.
Since coronavirus began spreading late last year, three service members, four military dependents, one DoD civilian and one DoD contractor have been diagnosed as of March 10, out of more than 80,000 cases worldwide.
As of March 10, Friedrichs told reporters, 13 military labs had received coronavirus test kits, which are able to perform about 400 tests each. Per his latest briefing, he said, military providers had performed about two dozen tests, most of which had come back negative.
At the Pentagon, senior leadership began “social distancing” on March 9, taking care to give attendees of meetings and briefings at least three feet of personnel space, per the CDC’s recommendations for reducing airborne transmission of the virus.
“This morning we had a meeting at the senior level that is normally as many people as you can cram into a room for a meeting, and we actually broke that out into a number of rooms,” Hoffman said, dropping from what would has been 50 people in one conference room to 20 or 25, then linking other rooms by teleconference.
The Ivy League decision about the basketball tournament caused the teams that will be left out of the league tournament to complain (whine, as far as I am concerned). What selfishness! Sure, it’s a disappointment for the student-athletes, but the coaches should be setting a better example. Coronavirus is a public health crisis, for goodness sake. Think about someone else’s well-being for a change. The NCAA should follow the Ivy League (and Johns Hopkins’) decision, or at the very least, postpone the basketball championships. And the NBA should ignore LeBron James and plan not to admit fans to NBA arenas during the pandemic.
I was reading a few days ago South Korean sources blasting their president about “mishandling” the epidemic by not banning travel from China, then I see on this forum praises about the way South Korea handled the coronavirus and the whole situation made me smile.
The truth is, we are very subjective creatures : if I would live in the city of Daegu, I would be really mad at the religious sect and their bad hygiene habits. If my parent would have been in the nursing home in Washington state, I would be furious at the lack of isolation abilities and if I would live in Westchester county I would probably think that the super socializing lawyer should have washed hands more often and skip the temple meetings when sick.
But since I do not live in any of the hot spots, I am trying to look at all this from a more eastern than western perspective ( because it helps with sanity ) : wanting to control life makes people go crazy. There is a reason behind everything, I just don’t know it. Bad things happen to good people. And, one that is really hard to swallow : natural selection will continue to operate despite our struggles and despair.
In this case it’s likely “state of emergencies” just means that certain things can be done easier than usual.
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@emilybee Oh, he made that clear. This is a cool customer and not one prone to hyperbole. This state has relatively few (11 I believe) cases so far. Whatever it takes, I say.
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Ah, ok. Then you shouldn’t have been surprised with what you saw at Kaiser.
The mayor of New Orleans has cancelled all weekend parades and second lines for this weekend. Phew… Of course, she can’t control the suburbs but I bet they’ll follow suit (although one parade happened last weekend in Slidell).
A paper out of Germany based on 7 ‘mild’ and 2 serious hospitalized patients looked at every possible detail of infections. Highlights are that live virus is only present for the first week, but in tremendous quantity. They found live virus in throat and nasal swabs. Viral ‘shedding’ occurs much longer, that is the ability to detect the viral RNA in samples. So people are infectious for a much shorter time than they test positive- good news.
Seroconversion, or antibody production, begins to appear after the first week. This is earlier than for SARS and MERS. BUT, seroconversion was not correlated to rapid reduction of viral RNA. Viral load decreased gradually, over weeks. They caution that immunizations geared toward immune activation will need to induce “a very strong response “ in order to be effective- not such good news.
So far no reports of someone being reinfected after recovery, but it’s early days.
This is an early release paper, not yet peer reviewed, on very few patients. However the info is worth noting going forward.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1.full.pdf+html
Yale finally caved.
"We are asking Yale College students to remain at home after spring recess. For undergraduates who are on campus now, please make every effort to return home as soon as possible, and no later than Sunday, March 15. Yale College Dean Marvin Chun will be providing additional details in the coming days. Undergraduates will have the support of the university in meeting their academic requirements remotely while at home. I understand that some undergraduates consider New Haven to be their home or cannot leave the university at this time. The Yale College Dean’s Office will provide separate instructions for these students, who also will take their classes online.
Graduate and professional students are encouraged to remain off-campus and participate in online instruction, unless required to be on campus due to the nature of their research or academic programs. More information is forthcoming from the deans of each school.
The university will remain open and continue to provide custodial and limited dining services."
I was seriously starting to wonder if they had the sense to do it.
Disclaimer: I know NOTHING about Fordham U.
So my friend who is a prof at Fordham is transitioning to online classes but the problem is some of his students don’t have their own laptop or computer. As far as he knows, the uni isn’t addressing the problem. The current non-solution is for students to go to libraries but that’s not feasible for a lot of people - especially working students. And it’s not going to be feasible for anyone if communities go into lockdown.
My undergrad had a grant in my FA package for very low income students to buy a laptop - but it was VERY low income. I think you had to have a 0 EFC. Graduate students, everyone had a piece of their first year budget for laptops.
Anyone hear how other unis are addressing this? If at all?
Ohio State, who just went to online classes until 3/30, gives every student a new fancy ipad when they enroll. But at Fordham, working students should be able to use the time they would be in class to hit the library? Many universities also have laptops for loan, although I think more to tide students over if they need a repair than enough to loan one out to every student who doesn’t have one.
New information about the shortage of "RNA Extraction " kits needed for testing of coronavirus.
"A looming shortage in lab materials is threatening to delay coronavirus test results and cause officials to undercount the number of Americans with the virus.
The slow pace of coronavirus testing has created a major gap in the U.S. public health response. The latest problem involves an inability to prepare samples for testing, creating uncertainties in how long it will take to get results.
CDC Director Robert Redfield told POLITICO on Tuesday that he is not confident that U.S. labs have an adequate stock of the supplies used to extract genetic material from any virus in a patient’s sample — a critical step in coronavirus testing.
“The availability of those reagents is obviously being looked at,” he said, referring to the chemicals used for preparing samples. “I’m confident of the actual test that we have, but as people begin to operationalize the test, they realize there’s other things they need to do the test.”
The coronavirus task force convened by the White House is also aware of the shortages, and one official said members are working on it.
The growing scarcity of these “RNA extraction” kits is the latest trouble for U.S. labs, which have struggled to implement widespread coronavirus testing in the seven weeks since the country diagnosed its first case. Epidemiologists and public health officials say that the delayed rollout, caused in part by a botched CDC test, has masked the scope of the U.S. outbreak and hobbled efforts to limit it.
If enough processing kits aren’t available, the risk that testing will be disrupted is “huge,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of molecular diagnostics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“RNA extraction is the first step in being able to perform” a coronavirus test, he said. “If we cannot perform this step, the [coronavirus] test cannot be performed.
Public health labs across the U.S. have tested more than 5,000 people, according to the Trump administration. HHS Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers on Tuesday that U.S. labs’ capacity could grow to 10,000-20,000 people per day by the end of the week.
“Increased demand for testing has the potential to exhaust supplies needed to perform the test itself,” said Robin Patel, president of the American Society for Microbiology. That would limit the testing capacity of public health, hospital and commercial labs alike, she added.
Complicating the situation, most labs have been running at least two tests per patient — although that could soon change. The CDC issued interim guidelines on Monday that minimize the number of tests required for a diagnosis. The agency says labs can combine a patient’s nose and throat samples into one test, a move experts say will cut in half the amount of supplies used to test each person.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/coronavirus-testing-lab-materials-shortage-125212
NOT good!!
Tufts just bagged live classes for the rest of the semester. Everyone has to be cleared out by Monday.
Just got off a large call with Dr Shepard. A Yale based virologist. A couple of key takeaways.
- he thinks the mortality rate will be between .4 and 1 percent. Higher than flu but not as widespread.
-it appears to have r naught number of 2. Less than flu but will see exponential expansion for a short period of time.
-the vaccine will take at least a year but their are some promising drugs perhaps much sooner for severe cases.
-it was born from a fruit bat.
- it does not “come back” in reality It’s much more likely that there were false negative tests.
-the four current coronavirues that cause the common cold are seasonal of course. They believe this may follow suit. He did not say there is a definitive explanation for why.
-it is much less lethal than sars and especially mers.
- it it slowed down seasonally it would come back in the fall. But not necessarily or expected in a worse form. That’s guess work. However that breather would be very good for drug and vaccine testing. But especially on public health policy makers.
-Britain’s public health teams are working closely with USA. They’ve broken it down into five categories of approach. The first being containment is already over and was only possible in an environment where cluster one could be identified in Wuhan.
No that won’t work anymore or be good policy. It’s reduction mode step 2. Also the basics everyone is talking about here. Social distancing. Self quarantine if exposed. Reduction in large groupings and quick response to cluster areas. Test kits etc.
That’s most of my notes. Hope it helps.
How do the other countries test? Should we swallow our “pride” and just get some kits from WHO in the meantime?
Yowza. Daughter just texted me with this news: new case of the virus in MN - someone in their thirties, no known underlying conditions, hospitalized in critical condition.
Of course, D and her family also live in MN.
There’s always a percentage of genetic predisposition or underlying causes previously not seen. It seems that high blood pressure and diabetes among other things can make it more dangerous. Unfortunately there will be very sad exceptions to the statistics.
I still shake hands if others do so. I just sanitize them afterward. As I’ve said ad nauseam, it’s much easier to sanitize myself than to worry about the surfaces I touch.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that we don’t have test kits from WHO.
@ucbalumnus : my question wasn’t about death (we all know about order of succession… If only because we watched Battlestar Galactica or Designated survivor 
;)…) but about serious, debilitating illness. Does the VP take over? What if the VP has to be quarantined due to being in contact with the president? If the president is sick but not feeling ill, can someone order him to self quarantine or can he decide himself?
Has there been any information about how many people in a population will get this virus?
Did everyone in Wuhan get this virus, even those quarantined who did not go to a hosptial?
Is it a foregone conclusion that every one of us is getting this virus?