anonsubmit2671
Second part, you're dead wrong in two areas. Manufacturing of essential goods continues in haste. And, stimulus is essential for people have lost their jobs and need to buy food. So take your theoretical keyboard economics degree and leave it at the door. Let's take away your source of income, ability to work and see how you feed your family.
Relocate your abilities where they can be best utilized and compensated where things are designed, engineered and/or manufactured.
CMIIAW: this doesn't seem like a readily DIY biohacking-possible project without some significant infrastructure, procedural knowledge, and expenses.
Also is there a low-volume, open source rtPCR procedure with cheaper equipment and consumables?
People > profits
- Climate change
- Antibiotic resistance
- Peak phosphorus
- Nutrition availability
- Water usage
- Pollution of air, water and soil (lakes of pig shit sprayed into the air)
somewhere down the list is animal cruelty, but most people are selfish, unconvinced and don't care if it happens elsewhere as long as they don't have to watch it.
If humans are to survive, meat (and resource-intensive substitutes) and fossil fuels have to go bye-bye because they're too risky in the long-term.
- Facemasks work if worn, fitted, tested and removed properly. Plus, it's not just about the person protecting themselves, but protecting others. The problem is for-profit hospitals and ineffective government (HHS' SNS) failed to prepare, and just-in-time inventory doesn't work during a crisis. It's like telling people to plant trees or recycle to "fight" climate change. There should've been billions of masks and respirators ready and given to anyone and everyone. I happen to have a dozen or so 3M NIOSH N95 respirators because of one of the worst forest fires in decades, but there aren't any hospitals for miles.
- Eye protection, with indirect or no venting, is also essential. Droplets in the eyes is a no-go.
- Hand washing doesn't have much to do with this current outbreak because it's not the primary mode of transmission. This is habits-manipulation health theater. Maybe some people need it, but this comes across as hygiene theater bikeshedding.
- Manipulating people into grossly under-preparing (two weeks? what a joke.) and making unnecessary trips, putting themselves, their families and others in danger is irresponsible. 3-6 months of shelf-stable food that would be eaten anyways is a more sensible number, and reduces risky trips by 90%.
From "the paper of record" that decides what people "should" believe.
It doesn't appear to have an FDA EUA so it may not be immediately usable in the US.
The user-friendly UX and compact size seem good.
The cycle time seems to be on the slow side when minutes count in an ER / ICU situation. ~9 tests per day per machine seems slow, costly and likely to occupy a lot of space for the machines and the cartridges (which contain reagents that have to be kept chilled).
This seems overall like a timely product to solve immediate needs. It could've been better but it was designed quickly.
Without a vaccine and pervasive testing, isolation resets the clock on the pandemic curve and it starts like Groundhog Day all over again, but at a potentially lower level. It will keep happening over and over again, especially spreading N <--> S hemispheres with the seasons. It will keep happening until either everyone is infected, resulting in hundreds of millions of cumulative deaths, indefinite isolation, or a vaccine is widely-deployed.
That is reality.
This wouldn't happen in the US because the prevailing attitude is "everyone for themselves; working together is communism." Oddly enough, parts of the Bay Area experienced "panic buying" of masks in early January: I was at a Walgreens on El Camino in Palo Alto when people were buzzing like bees around masks like they were toilet paper at Costco nowadays. IIRC, it was mostly persons of Asian ancestry because they follow the news and have friends and family overseas; a few globally-aware Caucasians did as well.
A 15 minute test cannot possibly do rtPCR which takes 45 minutes minimum, so this could only be an antibody test for who has recovered or is recovering. It's totally worthless in a clinical setting.
For initial infection, rtPCR is the gold standard and takes at least 45 minutes as of writing.
https://www.surescreen.com/products/covid-19-coronavirus-rap...
Lying to people doesn't help public health or fix the problems of the federal government failing to act. The AARC told HHS to get their act together about the SNS on ventilators, but the govt didn't.
The circumstances of this situation is that ventilated COVID patients often drown in their own plasma, get bacterial pneumonia or their lungs are irreparably destroyed. Like ECMO, this sort of ventilation is a hail mary procedure to try to salvage patients.
Even COVID survivors with mild symptoms, they may have reduced lung capacity due to lung damage.. and that may well be permanent. I suspect lung transplant lists will be backlogged the world over due to this pandemic.
The flip-side of globalization is there are unlikely to be any more large-scale conventional or NBC wars (only proxy, cyber and economic wars) because of extreme economic interdependency.
When people don't have money to meet their non-discretionary needs and unemployment reaches 20-30%, which is worse than the Great Depression, what follows is deflation and depression on an unprecedented macro scale. At the street scale, starvation and homelessness would be the impact; Venezuela, Cuba and the UN would be flying in doctors, refugee camp materials and food to the US.
Massive UBI directly to individuals and small businesses enough to meet basic needs is essential, and will be spent into the economy because MPC will be nearly 1.0. Otherwise, the US economy will contract more and for longer than at any point in recorded history.