COVID-19 thread

[Linguoboy]

Ya I had heard of this. Adapt or go extinct i guess.

Distilleries in Chicago don't really need to worry about this, as liquor stores have officially been designated "essential services" under the terms of the State of Illinois' stay-at-home order. But as far as I know, only one--CH Distillery on the South Side--is making a hand sanitiser version of one of its branded liquors, namely Jeppsen's Malört, a beloved local brand of bäsk.

[chris_notts]

This is one of the biggest commercial tragedies of corona so far! They are going to have to bin millions of plants:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52098436

There's lots of things we can live without, but nice gardens aren't one of them.

[Yalensky]

Distilleries in Chicago don't really need to worry about this, as liquor stores have officially been designated "essential services" under the terms of the State of Illinois' stay-at-home order. But as far as I know, only one--CH Distillery on the South Side--is making a hand sanitiser version of one of its branded liquors, namely Jeppsen's Malört, a beloved local brand of bäsk.

So it will taste the same then! I know that Koval on the North Side is also making hand sanitizer, but I don't know to what extent it's a "version" of any of their potable products, especially since it'll be exclusively for medical facilities and retirement homes.

I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that the reason for counting liquor stores as essential is that they don't want alcoholics suffering withdrawal symptoms and taking up hospital space. Not that any non-alcoholics are demanding justification...

[chris_notts]

Wouldn't the same logic apply to all drug users?

[So Haleza Grise]

Wouldn't the same logic apply to all drug users?

It would; but good luck getting governments, which are currently trying to ban things as much as they can, to shift towards legalising things that are currently banned!

[akam chinjir]

Cannabis stores actually are classed as essential in Canada, I think. (https://www.thestar.com/news/2020/03/27 ... break.html.)

[Yalensky]

Wouldn't the same logic apply to all drug users?

Apparently it would! (Though AFAIK the pot shops are not planning on making a THC-infused hand sanitizer, alas.)

[rotting bones]

Beware of paracetamol. Its action is weak, tempting you to take extra tablets. Just four adult doses in less than four hours can send you to a painful death from acute liver failure. Having said that, it is very safe as long as you don't exceed the dosage.

[Torco]

Ya I had heard of this. Adapt or go extinct i guess.

Distilleries in Chicago don't really need to worry about this, as liquor stores have officially been designated "essential services" under the terms of the State of Illinois' stay-at-home order. But as far as I know, only one--CH Distillery on the South Side--is making a hand sanitiser version of one of its branded liquors, namely Jeppsen's Malört, a beloved local brand of bäsk.

They were? heh. we're some drug-loving monkeys, we.

Governments are never very equanimous regarding different drugs: they, rather, smile on some and frown on others: I wonder what the pattern is? (psst, we know, it's capitalism)

Also, what? really? 4g of paracetamol can kill you? I'm pretty sure I've taken like 2g on some occasion. yiques!

[rotting bones]

Well, it could kill you, but it's not likely to. You'd have to be sensitive to paracetamol, have kidney or liver impairment, or you'd have to have taken more paracetamol earlier or later in the day within 24 hours. Usually, a cause for serious concern is more than 10g within 24 hours. Even if it doesn't kill you, 4g in under 4 hours may very well damage your liver. Why chance it? (All this is from memory. Believe reliable sources through their archangel Google, not me.)

[Raphael]

Governments are never very equanimous regarding different drugs: they, rather, smile on some and frown on others: I wonder what the pattern is? (psst, we know, it's capitalism)

I can't really agree with that statement. First, I'm pretty sure that there is money to be made in pretty much all drugs, so I don't really see how the government smiling on one drug and frowning on another drug can both be caused by capitalism; and second, the various officially non-capitalist planned-economy governments of the 1970s and 1980s weren't really different about what drugs they allowed and what drugs they banned from the capitalist governments of the time.

[Kuchigakatai]

(With regard to New York...)

Speaking to reporters earlier on Saturday about the situation in New York, Mr Trump said: "We'd like to see [it] quarantined because it's a hotspot... I'm thinking about that." / He said it would be aimed at slowing the spread of the virus to other parts of the US.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded by saying that quarantining the state of New York would be "preposterous" and "anti-American". / "If you said we were geographically restricted from leaving, that would be a lockdown." / He said New York had already implemented "quarantine" measures, such as banning major gatherings and ordering people to remain at home, but that he would oppose any "lockdown" efforts. / "Then we would be Wuhan, China, and that wouldn't make any sense," he told CNN, adding that this would cause the stock market to crash in a way that would make it impossible for the US economy to "recover for months, if not years". / "You would paralyse the financial sector," he said.

(Source: BBC, 2020-03-29)


Would a quarantine paralyze Wall Street, if only due to a drop of confidence?



Meanwhile, a scandal turned up in Spain a few days ago after the Spanish government bought 8000 coronavirus testing kits from China, and they proved to have such low detection rates for the virus, 30% (i.e. they give false negatives 70% of the time). As in, people were demonstrably ill with it through other means, but the virus didn't turn out with the kits. In light of it, a similar controversy has been going on in Argentina when that became known in Spain, as the Argentinian government had bought about 1500 kits from China at around a similar time as well. The Chinese government responded saying that Spain didn't buy them from them directly, but through an unnamed Spanish distributor that got them from an unauthorized company in China...

From El País, in English:

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020 ... spain.html

[Raphael]

Would a quarantine paralyze Wall Street, if only due to a drop of confidence?

I'm not sure if Wall Street's confidence could drop much farther than it already has...

[Kuchigakatai]

Meanwhile in El Salvador, a lot of the talk has been centered on people being rather more afraid of a famine than the virus. Far too many people barely scrape by through daily sales, so the current situation where people are avoiding to go out means they're getting basically no income. There have been some assurances that some kind of welfare will be provided either as food or to obtain food, but there is also a lot of concerned talk about that because El Salvador has never implemented anything close to a welfare system. There has never been an institution to provide things to a large number of people, let alone people at large.

[Pabappa]

The whisky distillery I was talking about earlier turned out to be far better than I expected. They were absolutely swimming in hand sanitizer and I saw people in front of me buying boxes of it that they could hardly lift for hundreds of dollars apiece. I just bought the single one-liter bottle I had been planning to, but I might go back tomorrow for more even though the price is higher for bulk orders in order to keep supply flowing to those who need it. It only cost me $3 for the bottle I bought, which is well below market price, let alone the price people are selling it for online, so even their higher price is well within reason.

And they did a good job on the label, too:

http://pabappa.com/pics/handsanitizer1.jpg

Oh, incidentally, there was another brewery down the road also selling hand sanitizer, but for eight times the price. It shows how society has changed that both stores were selling the same product for wildly different prices and yet they both had lines running out into the street. Although I could clearly tell that the one at the cheaper brewery was longer and moving faster.

[cedh]

For anyone who's interested in seeing things through the eyes of the virus: https://xkcd.com/2287/

[doctor shark]

Also, what? really? 4g of paracetamol can kill you? I'm pretty sure I've taken like 2g on some occasion. yiques!

It's biochemistry-related!

When you consume paracetamol/acetaminophen, your body converts it to several different compounds, including a "fun" one called NAPQI that's just slightly lethal. Normally, your body is able to neutralize the NAPQI with a compound it normally makes called glutathione, but there's a finite amount of glutathione that your body can produce... and when your body runs out of enough glutathione to neutralize the NAPQI, that's when toxic effects appear.

The amount that could be dangerous is highly variable and dependent from person-to-person (if you consume a lot of alcohol, your natural biochemistry, your body mass...), but a "safe" rule of thumb is that doses above 4 g in a short period can cause issues and above 10 g in a 24-hour period can lead to severe liver damage.

[Raphael]

The latest talking point among some right-wing propagandists in the USA is apparently that just because people died while being infected with the corona virus, it doesn't mean that they died of the corona virus - they might as well have died of something else while they just happened to have the corona virus.

That's pretty dumb in many ways, but in a way, it's also kind of clever: no matter how many people die of Covid-19, they'll always be able to say "these people didn't die of Covid-19, they just happened to die while they were infected with the corona virus".

Also interesting how Trump himself has at least partly switched to talking about all the great things he's doing to fight against and stop Covid-19, while parts of the pro-Trump propaganda machinery keep talking about how the whole thing is no big deal and just media hype.




Ah yes, and Hungary is now a full-on dictatorship.

[Raphael]

For anyone who's interested in seeing things through the eyes of the virus: https://xkcd.com/2287/

I wonder what the thing on the left in the "three germs talking" frames is supposed to be. The thing in the center is a virus, and the thing on the right is a bacterium, but what's the thing on the left?

[MacAnDàil]

The latest talking point among some right-wing propagandists in the USA is apparently that just because people died while being infected with the corona virus, it doesn't mean that they died of the corona virus - they might as well have died of something else while they just happened to have the corona virus.

That's pretty dumb in many ways, but in a way, it's also kind of clever: no matter how many people die of Covid-19, they'll always be able to say "these people didn't die of Covid-19, they just happened to die while they were infected with the corona virus".

Also interesting how Trump himself has at least partly switched to talking about all the great things he's doing to fight against and stop Covid-19, while parts of the pro-Trump propaganda machinery keep talking about how the whole thing is no big deal and just media hype.




Ah yes, and Hungary is now a full-on dictatorship.

Ouch. Yup. https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/coron ... ide-2020-4

And the Belarussian dictator is suggesting drinking vodka, so he would prefered the the original to the hand sanitiser.