Brontoforumus

Hate to break it to you but if you're going to put the lives of the audience('s family and friends, who may not have even had anything to do with your fucking theater) at risk just to avoid irritating the Transformers fans, then you've dunked your head straight into the political controversy.

Someone pointed out elsewhere that this is 100% predicated on "Wait, customers wearing masks won't eat popcorn"

AMC Theatres Reverses Course, Will Require Face Masks Upon Reopening

They still shouldn't fucking be reopening at all, but at least they're walking back part of a profoundly stupid decision.

I can feel for the plight of theater owners during this time; the local Alamo Drafthouse franchisee filed for bankruptcy and that fucking sucks. But filing for chapter 11 and saying "I hope I can turn this around once it's safe to reopen" is the right thing to do. Reopening before there's a vaccine goddamn-well isn't.

(Also I don't like going to AMC theaters that much in the first damn place. They're the most expensive theaters in town and trying to use the concession kiosks fills me with rage.)

Not to change the subject, but did you hear the one about how the Trump administration paid a company millions for test tubes, but got soda bottle blanks instead?

Seriously, look at this shit:

I recognize that shape. You get them hot enough to make them flexible, clamp a two-piece bottle mold around it up to the neck, and then shoot in air to puff it up to a whole two-liter bottle. Pretty cool! But also not how you make test tubes!

The state officials say that these “preforms,” which are designed to be expanded with heat and pressure into 2-liter soda bottles, don’t fit the racks used in laboratory analysis of test samples. Even if the bottles were the right size, experts say, the company’s process likely contaminated the tubes and could yield false test results. Fillakit employees, some not wearing masks, gathered the miniature soda bottles with snow shovels and dumped them into plastic bins before squirting saline into them, all in the open air, according to former employees and ProPublica’s observation of the company’s operations.

US cases per day are up 65% from two weeks ago. Florida just exploded with 10k cases.

who could have possibly foreseen this

The tip one just kills me. Wow.

So this is some pretty big news: Deliberate herd immunity is looking like an impossibility.

The Lancet (via CNN): Spain had the third highest deaths per capita among sizable countries and so far it seems that only 5% of the population has antibodies that come up in screening.

There's almost certainly other factors in immunity, both naturally preexisting and post-infection, but 5% is PALTRY.

Mongrel wrote:So this is some pretty big news: Deliberate herd immunity is looking like an impossibility.

I think it's more that deliberate herd immunity without a vaccine is looking like an impossibility. Which is extremely useful to corroborate, but not an entirely surprising finding. (People were criticizing the idea of intentional exposure to create herd immunity months ago, when Boris Johnson was pushing it right before he got the virus.)

So far as we know, herd immunity through vaccination should still be possible -- but we need a vaccine first.

For the record my wife and I are Southwest of Houston (Fort Bend County). From time for calling for testing to the scheduled day of our test (tomorrow), it was ten days. Then we’re looking at another two or three days for results. As bad as things look numerically, it still all comes down to actually getting people tested being a Sisyphusean nightmare. We tried to go twice to a walk-in no-appointment testing while waiting for our scheduling and both times got turned away due to being out of tests — the first time an hour before the site opened and just missing the cut off, and the second time over two and a half hours before the site opened without even being able to see the cut off point in the line ahead of us.

(We’re both okay; some slight shortness of breath and coughing that we are almost entirely sure is due to allergies / Sahara dust cloud, but she has had some more serious symptoms of muscle pains and intense fatigue —likely tied to different ongoing symptoms — during this time of waiting to test that makes us want to rule it out as being actually Covid.)

Bolsonaro just tested positive.

Sadly, I assume he'll survive.

yeah it's pretty obvious this is a right-wing virus that only kills poor people and old artists by now

Being a lefty liberal does map onto having a particular kind of amygdala, it's possible the damn thing is targeting us on a genetic level.

A friend on another forum just put together this handy dandy resource:

How many 9-11s worth of deaths has COVID-19 caused so far in the United States?

41, as of the time of this posting.

And while we're at it...

- insect stings (2000-2017): 0.37
- 2019 flu deaths: 8-20
- 2019 auto deaths: 12
- 2019 opioid deaths: 23
- World War II (US casualties): 92

US infections closing in on 10% of the entire population of the US (just passed 3 million).

Mongrel wrote:US infections closing in on 10% of the entire population of the US (just passed 3 million).

...might wanna check your decimal point.

1% is still a hell of a lot, mind, and still increasing.

Right, sorry, brain is melting in our current heatwave.

Then again, I've read headlines with some official or another claiming we could have as much as ten times more cases than are being reported.