@CowperKettle Which do you mean? The true bullfinch or the pretender to that title, known as the New World tanager?

@Gigili That sounds rather weird to me. I seem to learn a language better than I like it, or if I don't like it at the start, with progress it starts to grow on me.

Sorry, I meant I learn it better if I like it. Not than.

@tchrist - My son (nurse) has two people on his unit in negative pressure isolation, and some of the health care workers are symptomatic, but they aren't being tested or sent home. The lack of tests is a shit show. No wonder the numbers in PA are so low...

@anongoodnurse That's horrible.

This is to say that, first, I'm sorry you're in a few of the categories, but the most important point is don't trust the numbers, please.

I'm looking at CO, and te numbers are climbing, but tis is probably at least an order of magnitude or two off...

I have a lot more risk factors than just that. And Colorado's governor just told us there are thousands of cases in Colorado that we don't know about yet.

I read that, and I believe it.

I'm now treating this with uttermost care.

I believe that's true of PA as well.

Probably.

@tchrist Good. I'm worried. Please... take care. Above and beyond.

Today is the last day my company's Pennsylvanian office is going to be open. That's the big one.

I'm very happy to hear that.

They cancelled all travel a couple days ago.

I have a sinus infection right now and am having reduced lung capacity; shortness of breath, etc.

Hate it.

I've decided I'm just going to stay home for a couple of weeks at least, though I do have an appointment with an orthopod for my leg.

But it's upper- not lower-, and no fever, so I know it's unrelated. But I don't dare get it now.

@tchrist I've never ad SOB, but I can imagine it's a terrible feeling.

Exactly.

Albuterol helps.

I had gestational asthma, but it was never bad.

I'm back on albuterol and symbicort for the first time since our bad forest fires.

I'll keep checking in from time to time. Is Mitch in a relatively safe place? And Robusto?

Rob's out of Boston, down in Albuquerque now. Mitch is still in Boston, I think.

It's funny; I've been gone for so long. But I still worry. Take care.

I guess Seattle is nearly out of measures they can take. They've gone through most of their 13-step escalation plan.

Little left beyond shutting down all businesses, making people stay in their homes, and having the national guard enforce a cordon sanitaire.

This is going to get so bad. There's a shortage of ventilators somewhere, I can't remember where, but it's starting.

I know. It won't even peak till mid- to late summer.

That means it's going to keep getting much, much worse until then at the least.

We need to do what the Dems are proposing, and get those testing kits out and start using them.

Just stay home now.

We're very soon now going to see thousands of new cases a day, and hundreds of deaths.

@tchrist I am. I hear people already talking about it slowing down because it's spring. Where did they get that idea? This is not going to slow down and reappear.

And that's just the beginning.

@anongoodnurse Because rhinoviruses tend to. But no, it won't.

Just see Brazil and Australia.

@tchrist I agree. And I hate it.

@tchrist I know! People are associating it with the coronaviruses tat cause te common cold.

Italy is doing it right. So should we.

Flatten the curve for the whole country.

Yes, we have to. ASAFP. You saw the Times interactive graphic on that this morning?

But no, our administration is afraid of numbers, not people dying.

I know.

@tchrist Yes.

That's part of why no testing.

No testing, no bad numbers.

This is the most grave and tragic thing to happen to our nation and our world since the Second World War. We need to be treating it that way.

I have some other things to do, but between my broken leg and this, reading is an awful lot of what I do these days.

Please go do your other things. I have a meeting to go to I'm late to but nobody else has shown up either.

@tchrist email the President, the newspapers, whatever as well. Do be careful.

Escapist reading is good. Professional reading may not help your mind.

@tchrist I'm worried about my kids. I have a nurse and a doctor (ER) among them.

You should be.

So I'm keeping up...

The front line people get continuously exposed to the virus. It wears them down.

So despite their ages, etc etc.

yes.

okay going now for sure, meeting has been joined

computer is misbehaving. Dare not take it in. Bye.

@Robusto Weird but true? Well, I've learned languages that I liked at first and languages that I was neutral about, and I stopped learning both. The fact is if you dislike someone, you can try to learn their personality to beat them, same goes for the languages, if you dislike a language you can learn it to destroy it.

That doesn't make much sense because I just made it up.

No need to browse Times for updates on coronavirus outbreak, just log in to ELU chat and you'll get the most recent news.

@anongoodnurse They got the idea because their president told them so. Sadly.

> It’s the first death in the state since the first two people tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, in Colorado on March 5. Currently the state has 72 known cases of the disease.

Well that was fast.

That was this morning.

Schools closed everywhere except in Mecklenburg, which is the least populated state of them all. (The sixth largest in the country, but only 1 million people live there out of a total of 86. And half of them live in just two or three towns on the Baltic Sea coast.)

I went to the supermarket around the corner, lots of empty shelves. Toilet paper sold out, many beverages, almost all the pasta except for the most expensive brands.

The zombie apocalypse is here.

Why toilet paper, of all things. I keep hearing that from everywhere.

The last time I saw a shortage of toilet paper on a national scale was in the USSR in the late 1980s.

I need to watch The Road again. Fantastic movie. And read the book again. Fantastic book.

@Robusto Matriculation at Harvard Medical School.

Ask @Mitch; he got in.

.

Knowing that I could find the answer with a quick search, and at risk of embarrassing myself, I still don't know why so many people are raiding the toilet paper shelves.

@RegDwigнt Oh thank god I'm not the only one to wonder

@Færd Mitch is going to Harvard?

@Færd I'm old enough to remember having to wipe wit newspaper in my Gran's outhouse. Not something I ever want to do again. I imagine it's even worse with a computer.

@terdon - Yes, our fearful leader as expressed a great many untruths so far about the virus, and absolutely no empathy. It is extremely disquieting.

We still have such an outhouse at our datcha. Newspaper works perfectly fine. Don't use them glossy magazines though.

A couple years ago I took two friends of mine there on a visit. When they saw the outhouse they lay in stitches laughing for many minutes straight.

In the Soviet Union, we used to have that joke, "following numerous reader requests, from now on the Pravda newspaper will be published with no text and as a roll".

Well, this week that Aussie newspaper that I'm sure all of you saw did just that.

Adding a few extra empty pages for use as toilet roll.

Western reality has caught up with Soviet jokes.

@Færd like seriously though, what are they going to do with all that paper, eat it?

Pasta is sold out, but pasta sauce is not.

Toilet paper is sold out, but deep-frozen pizza isn't.

What kind of diet is that.

Canned beans are still there but canned peas are gone. WTF is even happening.

Am I the only one left who still knows how to cook properly.

Our shelves too are empty of many, many, many things.

I take no issue with that. I take issue with what things they are.

Canned beans are useful, but don't taste as good.

I tried watching that Trump address. Jesus fuck the man can't even read. It was so poorly delivered. Literally unwatchable.

Which one, today's or Wednesday night's?

And yes, he can't read.

Today's with the national emergency or whatever the legal term is.

Basic second-grade level tops.

Yeah.

Formal declaration of a state of emergency at the federal level.

I read better in second grade than he does now.

Half of these words don't even apply to what I saw.

Nothing formal, federal, declaration, or level.

So you're letting of, a, at, the slip by.

Pretty much so.

That's because those are the only words he can read.

I guess you haven't seen him trying to read out loud before. His Wednesday night thing was even worse.

He kept interrupting himself with nonsequiturs, which he always does, but usually those are his forte. The off-the-cuff bullshit nonsense. This time it was actually the worst bit. He couldn't even say what he wanted to say. Much less what smarter people had written for him.

A mumbling baffoon.

I didn't catch much of it; I had a video meeting.

Well I sought it out on YouTube.

And closed it maybe ninety seconds in.

@RegDwigнt Pinocchio dances poorly when Papa Vladimir Geppetto has let the strings go slack.

Like right off the bat there was a lot of blaming all other countries and patting himself on the back, which is the one single thing that he is truly excellent at, and he went and fucked up that. I couldn't believe my ears.

Wait, he did that AGAIN?

I thought he learned his lesson when he crashed the stock market yesterday because of all that.

Well of course. He started by saying how all the things he did in the last couple weeks saved thousands of lives.

He has done virtually nothing.

Except order that everything be secret.

But this time it was like he himself actually didn't believe it.

He's trying to keep "his numbers" down. Of cases. Don't test, don't tell.

@RegDwigнt Every now and then, not often, but in a recurring pattern that you only notice because of how much he hogs the camera, he lets down his façade just a tiny bit to reveal some latent self-awareness of how bad he is at everything.

The other thing was how we made the address not alone but surrounded by that crowd of fifty staff.

I only recognized the one dude that's always next to Pelosi in your parliament or whatever you call that circus.

That has to have been either her lieutenant, or else the opposing general.

Anyway, I know you're always supposed to do that, especially in times of great crises. Demonstrate unity. A fireman to your left, a policeman to your right, five generals in the background and a nurse. That kind of thing.

But this one time it sends the worst message actually.

It's cult stuff.

Fearless Leader.

You're not supposed to meet with more than four people at once.

When did Obama do that stuff.

Here there's a crowd of twenty. Doing nothing but standing there, waiting for Trump personally to infect them.

Louisiana has postponed its presidential primary election by two months. I wonder when Trump will try to pull that nationally.

Oh I was just about to say. None of that changes anything about his re-election of course.

Mark these simple words of mine: Katrina didn't kill Dubya.

He's now a lame duck walking.

@RegDwigнt Only because he didn't sit there at its whirling heart.

You can't hold general elections in this kind of situation. So they'll get postponed to like 2030 and there you go.

By that time everyone will either forget everything and hail him as the national hero, or they will not forget at all but he'll have had ten additional years in office anyway.

Catch-22.

We have to start separating people. We can't have the NIH guy and the CDC guy together, we can't have Prez and Veep together, etc.

I'm going to be so disappointed if he dies a martyr to the virus.

You should not have to separate them. They should bring to the table enough awareness of their own before you even ask.

These people are all high-risk, Trump the highest.

@tchrist every prez dies a martyr. Remember Reagan?

But presidential continuity has never been about the man, only the office.

Tell that to the man. Then tell that to the people.

@RegDwigнt Unfortunately. Also Carter and Nixon.

Yes I'm obviously picking the lowest and most recent hanging fruit.

@anongoodnurse Oh no sorry that was a joke

@anongoodnurse May I suggest switching to hand bidets. They do a better job and are more efficient and environmentally friendly.

@RegDwigнt What gets sold out depends on the original stocks too

Just as nothing did more for the rehabilitation of the public opinion of George Bush père than the stolen election of George Bush fils, nothing has done more for the rehabilitation of the public opinion of George Bush fils than the stolen election of Trump.

Well, not the election per se, but the calibre of the individual.

@Færd Yeah but this no pizza, this toilet paper. The stock of that reaches up to the sky at all times.

It's just a self-reinforcing effect in action.

@tchrist Ever-shortening memories. Feeling better?

As I said, I witnessed that all the time in the Soviet Union as a kid.

On what grounds?

What were they thinking?

One day they had no socks, so if the next day they did, you immediately went and bought all the socks they had. Even if you needed none.

@Færd Not much, my head is still snotty. Rome wasn't built in a day.

@RegDwigнt We're a profoundly irrational creature no matter under what regime

@RegDwigнt Lingering memories from the war's deprivations in the older generations, or newly kindled out of nothing?

@tchrist Try rinsing your nose and throat with saline. If it helps you could make sure it's not the devil. Because saline doesn't help with coronavirus.

@tchrist No, just a normal downwards spiral. Same as right now really. You see people on TV buying up toilet paper, you go fuck, this is madness, I better buy some myself real quick.

@Færd I don't have coronavirus. I have a sinus infection.

@tchrist Okay so you are already sure.

@tchrist principiis obsta. Or however you spell it. Also applies to the toilet roll situation.

@Færd I'm insufficiently febrile.

Well the symptoms vary from person to person. For some is doesn't get nasty at all. Maybe for the majority of the cases?

I'm no expert tho.

Some don't even notice it at all. Which is how it spreads.

@Færd This is responding to penicillin. It no virus is.

I suppose.

If you started bleeding from all orifices, like with Ebola, that'd catch people's attention.

Not if you wear diapers.