DDE

And behold, a pale horse, and he who sat on it, his name was Hand Sanitizer. Toss a coin to your newspaperman... On a more morbid note:

All hypergolic motors after maybe 1970, probably earlier for the US, were factory-filled with a shelf life of well over a decade. So why the fuss?

Not just video games. Ozon (Russia's Amazon) reports TV subscription sales are up 211% and board game sales are up 80%.

Haven't seen him, but I have just met this merchant of mirrors...

Uh-oh. Russia's clocked in another dozen cases today, including one second-hand transmission from an identified vector, and one kid who spent two days in school before being forced into quarantine. https://yandex.ru/chat/#/join/e8547709-3a39-4584-9168-b83145d0eb44/1584107376000006 *knocking on wood intensifies* It's not about full-on end of the world. We're slowly conducting similar preparations in case we end up subject to the 14-day quarantine - and people in quarantine have been fined for taking the trash. Good neighbors make good snitches.

Very healthy team environment right there...

Edit: the tweet above is probably gone because of the following denial: *glances distrustfully at two cats* But also the left, and any part of the right that can distance itself from Trump's downfall - they'd be the ones supplying any hypothetical expansion of the US welfare state. The far right is also celebrating under #boomerpox because they hate the core Trump electorate... Who isn't in on this conspiracy?

Agreed. This isn't a Tom Clancy novel. Not if you influence elections permanently. Which is exactly what happens when an event decimates a population group with known - and unwelcome - voting habits. Crippling a geopolitical opponent is a bonus. But I agree that there are far easier methods.

This assumes the interests of the decision-makers behind the purported attack are aligned with Trump or the general US populace. A very gracious assumption, but such discussions all too likely to end up unproductive, and are well beyond the scope of the forum. It is less plausible than a purely natural infection escaping a biological reservoir, yes. But hypothetically, in the US's place, using Typhoid Maries to deliver a seemingly natural virus would have been the way to do it - and you wouldn't want them to die while still in China. The best rebuttal to this is that China would have had everything on any USG personnel anywhere near Wuhan in autumn 2019, and wouldn't have been afraid to show it. Edit 2: so yes, now it looks like mudslinging; the other part of the Ministry is trying to smooth those comments over. It could be a certain someone else. We need to start selling Occam & Hanlon-brand razors. Edit: So on second thought, COVID would be a poor choice for the nefarious international elites (echo quotes optional) to cull the hoi polloi... because an airborne virus proliferated by airplane inevitably hits said international elites first, as we see quite well.

That title update is almost two millennia overdue... Anyway, better safe than sorry.

So I've just called in 'work from home' for today. Definitely got a mild form of respiratory infection yesterday - given that a colleague went down with tonsillitis on Wednesday, I have a clear suspect for the tiredness, very mild fever, and soreness in my upper throat. But then a whole lot of those COVID arrivals from Italy may have passed through the same subway hub as I do daily... Now to less personal issues... What we have here is the Foreign Ministry spokesman questioning whether US servicemen in the US that have been tested positive for COVID-19 post-mortem were the actual worldwide patients zero. Huge is true; not sure whether he is as prone to mudslinging as, say, Maria Zakharova.

It may be much, much worse than merely no emergency preps. https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-12/british-government-wants-uk-to-acquire-coronavirus-herd-immunity-writes-robert-peston/ In other news, Russia may or many not have its first COVID death. https://ria.ru/20200312/1568510703.html Rumoured to be a 75-year-old who'd been to Italy; confirmed only to have died in Moscow's designated COVID containment hospital.

Important PSA from Margo Simonyan's outfit: Also, don't mock others' sense of cleanliness: Edit: keep calm, but don't carry on. Especially if you're an MP.

It also looks like a problematic third level is private entities who the US feds/state and municipal authorities rely on to broadcast the bad news... and who usually neglect that unstated duty. https://www.propublica.org/article/should-i-quarantine-because-of-coronavirus-it-depends-who-you-ask

Which probably should be the default. I distinctly recall an entire section on that in my current employment contract, LOL. Apparently the problem isn't even rationing, but that CDC has to revalidate all hospital-side tests, no matter whether those work, once the level of the threat is escalated, putting the entire testing process on hold. The CDC also goofed up with its own testing kit early in the campaign. https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-test

Can we just have a physics law which states, plainly, that everything has a price?

No. That would be a series of two collisions with Mir caused by an attempt to use remote-controlled unmanned docking of Progress ships to save money. Radiator and solar panel clearance. The truss is also gone from the later iterations of NEM: Last I checked they are using a Mir 1 architecture with a Lyappa pivot on the core module, and no trusses at all. Spacing for solar panels, solar-thermal turbogenerators, possibly even a nuclear reactor, experiment packages, and attitude thrusters (see the small trusses on Mir 1).

Is that a hidden "three policemen" joke reference? Anyway, you often end up running up and down the hospital to have the head doctor sign that sick note, too.

The chance of which is low compared to all the times you lug it around as potentially explosive dead weight.

Didn't WHO claim some weeks ago that they'd phased the very term out? The problem is that the pay for sick leave, mandated by law, is computed on a vastly different basis from both ordinary pay and vacation.

Oh, I can testify to that. I avoided the hospital for years while I was on single-payer. Once my employer's insurance kicked in? I became an outright hypochondriac - one hospitalization due to an inflamed lymph node that was initially confused with appendicitis, a recent melanoma scare, and a gum abscess. At least I do get free dental. The people I see it offered to seem rather skeptical. But I'm surprised no-one has tried coupling it with fitness bracelets. Well, so far the Moscow government has settled for distributing the sick notes via courier. Not the least because they need to issue one for every person on the 14-day quarantine, which is already on the order of thousands. Don't blame the employers, blame the hyperregulated HR/accounting/tax complex, they aren't allowed to accept anything short of Form 182n.

Unfortunately that second bit means you remove the verification mechanism, and open the system up for abuse. Not abusing sick days requires levels of altruism even the most tightly-knit societies of old rarely achieved.

Welcome to battlefield triage, please enjoy your stay...

Looks like Ukraine wants to take the cake on COVID-19 response severity. One confirmed case, seven suspected, yet they've just initiated a three-week nationwide quarantine, complete with school shutdowns. https://www.kmu.gov.ua/news/uryad-prijnyav-nizku-rishen-shcho-mayut-ubezpechiti-ukrayinciv-vid-covid-19-11-03-20