StrangeSox

So how much did Foles cost them again

Welp RIP uiuc's plans, I guess. Is there any more arrogant group of professors than physicists? edit: perfect encapsulation of physicists' reduction of reality to models

Yikes

And an update from UIUC's testing: https://www.news-gazette.com/coronavirus/after-uptick-in-cases-ui-stepping-up-enforcement-asking-students-to-limit-in-person-gatherings/article_a231c4bb-a380-5bba-affb-d69ca8e5ae31.html Finding a lot of new cases initially, as was expected.

A few not-good-news studies on longer term heart impacts https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/01/coronavirus-autopsies-findings/ Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts

I think I heard a week or two back on WGN (Dr. Murphy from Northwestern) saying that Illinois hospitalizations had been steadily increasing so we could expect deaths to start climbing in a few weeks. Same trend as Texas, Florida and Arizona over the summer. Case counts climb, a couple of weeks later hospitalizations climb, a couple of weeks after that deaths climb. We went from a 7-day rolling average of new daily deaths of 14 at the end of July to 19-20 now. Illinois has been in a weird trend of slow-but-steady increasing cases and now deaths rather than the more rapid swings we've seen elsewhere. Our positivity rates have been climbing steadily since the end of June as well, when the state ignored the Phase 4 contact tracing requirements.

I guess the IDPH's daily data doesn't include these? Otherwise we'd be seeing a lot more tests in the data. Not great news today. Highest number of deaths since late June, testing dropped so we have a one-day positivity rate of 6.5%.

Really cool video, thanks for posting.

NBA Playoffs will resume tomorrow.

Something I heard the other day is that while the marginal cost of those tests may be $10, the total cost could be say $50-100 per test depending on how much new equipment you need to buy upfront. A big thing too is how heavily they can be automated. If it's a lot of manual work, the labor costs add up and can become bottlenecks as you try to really scale up. Multiple medical organizations have come out against the CDC's new guidance. Well, really, it was the White House Coronavirus taskforce absent Dr. Fauci that pushed this new guidance on the CDC rather than any scientific experts. The entire plan now is to insist that this is all in the past, we don't need testing, we don't need relief, we don't need PPE. Shut up and get back to work/school, we don't care how many of you suffer or die. e: relevant UIUC testing volume: This is one (albeit large) state university, and just them doing the minimum amount of testing to *possibly* safely reopen is accounting for a decent amount of our entire national testing. If just the flagship university of every state did the same amount of testing, we'd more than double our current national testing capacity.

Everyone is being tested twice a week I think?

e: wildcat strike by the NBA players

NYT reporting that these new guidelines came from the White House rather than the CDC. To illustrate how stupidly dangerous and deadly this is:

It's pretty awful that they've managed to seriously damage the credibility of both the FDA and CDC in such a short amount of time.

UIUC now accounts for 1-2% of all testing in the entire country every day. https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/1990170345

People want to vote by mail much moreso this year thanks to COVID as well.

Perhaps opening up colleges was actually dumb and irresponsible. Too bad nobody predicted that ahead of time.

People are relying a lot on the mail for things right now thanks to COVID, including vital things like medication, as mentioned in my post.

Tropical storms? Godzilla?

Meanwhile, nearly 1/4 of all mailed prescriptions in Cook County have been delayed. Either this is deliberate sabotage of a vital government service for political reasons, or it's simply a staggering level of incompetence. Either way, it's putting people at risk.

re: the plasma thing, my understanding is that there's barely even enough to do clinical trials let alone have it be a widespread treatment.

hell of a day for Zoom to crash nationwide