Our local crop-duster guy is doing business. I saw him dive-bombing a nearby orchard just yesterday. I suppose that’s considered essential business.
It would be interesting to know what the exact figure is, but of course at any given moment - up to a couple of weeks ago - a large percentage of passenger aircraft (most?) was in the sky at any one time. You stop that and you realise that, actually, we don’t really have adequate parking space if all of them are on the ground. This is a photo of Bournemouth Airport, a small regional airport in the UK, which BA is currently using as a plane park.
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The number of daily flights worldwide has declined by about 50% since the end of February.
China, taking heat for offering up a steady dose of pandemics to the world, could finally close down those wet animal markets. The Chinese could stop eating bats and pangolins, sparing the world from the next Chinese-made pandemic.
Indians might finally stop spitting in public, and get more of a sense of hygiene.
My wife and I were talking about this on Sunday. We guessed that buildings, especially medical ones might be built differently going forward. Again, just guesswork but it seems likely that many more segregated entrances will be constructed, and maybe in medical buildings there would be different entrances for patients, admin, nurses, infectious disease workers, etc.
Short term, once testing is widely available, I predict a rise in teaming groups of workers who are post-Covid. While simultaneously grouping those who haven’t yet contracted it. It would make sense for pilots, policemen, team drivers of trucks, and any occupation where a small group needs to work closely together.
Since this is the straight dope, let’s fight some ignorance.
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Pandemics have come from all over the world. H1N1 for example, has been absolutely devastating and originated in North America.
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Pangolin scales and bat meat are thought to be used in traditional medicine by a very small number of people in one or two cities in China; very few Chinese people are even aware of this culture. There is certainly no culture of “bat soup” or whatever that you hear on FOX.
But in terms of this pandemic, I believe the latest sequencing is suggesting it made the leap to humans via another species, so even the chinese medicine angle could be a red herring. -
One place that’s really punched under its weight for disease origins, is India. I think I’m right in saying there hasn’t been a record of a new human infectious disease starting in India in modern history (Nipah virus was a new outbreak of an existing strain. If that counts as a new virus that the US has had lots), which is surprising for a country with such a large population.
So your rant about Indian habits is even more off topic.
Actually I take this part back. I’m basing it on a chart I saw of infectious disease origins which had about 30 of the most significant pathogens to affect humans and their origins and none was from India.
But it’s a bit of a shaky foundation, I’ll admit. I can’t find the chart, and I can’t find a good cite either way (pretty hard to dig past all the coronavirus stuff right now, even explicitly trying to exclude those pages).
The first thing that popped into my mind regarding India and the possibility of it being a low source of disease origins is that they don’t eat a lot of meat. Lots of vegetarians and others who don’t eat beef or pork. Which means a lot less raising of those, esp. in tight quarters. Also cuts down on eating wildlife.
Has anyone seen the TV show Counterpart? I thought it was really cool in the early going, but then fell off in quality after they seemed not to know where to go with the cool premise. But one interesting aspect was a portrayal of what a post-pandemic world looked like. One item they had everywhere was these seemingly infrared devices in public that people put their hands in, kind of like you might do with those “blade” dryers. I guess it used infrared to disinfect the hands? I don’t know how realistic a notion that is.
I endorse these, but unfortunately many people will cry “racism” in response. :smack:
Good idea!
Well yes, but more importantly they are inaccurate and misleading statements.
In Aus, hospitals are already “built” like that. Until recently, they left the staff doors unlocked during business hours.
An important point is that lots of exits, and lots of alternate paths to the exits, are required for fire safety. A secondary point is that rooms and areas in hospitals get re-purposed all the time, and you wind up with a corridor going through a ward, with a “no access” sign on it, and people who think they won’t be recognized, or consider themselves too important for mere rules, ignoring the sign.
Internally in modern hospitals, the problem has been largely overcome by the use of electronic locks and access cards. Inside the segregated areas, the doors are still unlocked or open, so that staff can go through without using their hands, while pushing or carrying or sterile. Leaving the external doors unlocked was possible because of the locked internal areas.
Older buildings, which hadn’t been rebuilt with internal access control, started locking the external doors post 9/11
I am wondering whether all those people who said about religious clothing ‘in western countries we must show all of our faces in public!’ are going to shut up about it once they’re all wearing face masks.
Somehow it has suddenly and mysteriously become not a problem to have one’s face covered in public.
If you have it or even think you’ve been exposed you should definitely be wearing a face covering (and gloves, etc) if you go out (and you should only go out in an emergency). I remember the recommendation early on was that regular face masks available to the public would either be no help or even detrimental, but I read something earlier that said that perhaps this isn’t the case, based on several examples in Asia, though the jury still seems to be out wrt the general public wearing the things if they have no symptoms. The regular masks the public has aren’t fitted and don’t have the protections the professional PPE has, so it can give a false sense of security. No idea about religious garb and how much or how little protection that gives.
That said, I never got the issue some people have with folks who wear religious stuff or why you’d make laws to deny that. I guess maybe from a public safety perspective, especially if you have tons of camera systems and want to make sure you can see the evil doers doing evil or something, but it seemed more than that in some countries. I’m a live and let live kind of guy, so it’s no skin off my nose if someone wants to wear religious stuff as long as they don’t expect me too.
Airplanes and masks?
I heard a jet yesterday which is rare here near Volcano CA, usually heard only when severe weather disrupts flight paths of Sacramento or Reno-Tahoe airports. If we hear choppers or light planes, they’re usually searching for forest fire or fugitives; we’ve had none of those lately because snowbound. Should we fear sounds from the sky?
The mask situation is weird. Many jurisdictions ban covering one’s face in public because crime. Now the US may turn to total masking. Will facial recognition systems go bust? Will masked crime rise? Will Islam seem legit? Expect laws that a mask must depict the face underneath, so the industry becomes ultra-personalized.
The unanticipated?
We can expect some altered dress and behavior standards. But what will brainstorms produce? Hats, caps, and veils with strong IR projectors to sterilize our breaths, in-and-out. Luxury robotic sex-spa quarantine resorts for teledildonic satisfaction while detained. Pet squirrels genetically engineered to detect illness - if Perry sits upright on your shoulder, you’re OK - but beware hacked squirrels.
Two countries which made and have laws proscribing religious clothing are Turkey and France. At the time of the French Revolution and after the Turkish War of Independence. In both cases, the laws were directed against majority players (the RC population and the Islamic population), which were using clothing identification in a discriminatory manner, and protected the interests of minority players like you.
Non sequitur. My objection to the religious clothing is the blatant oppression of women: I was disgusted to see what was presumably a husband and wife (maybe brother and sister?) in a supermarket in Missouri. He was wearing jeans and a tight black T-shirt that showed off his muscles. She was wearing what Sam Harris would call a “bag”. It was not quite a burqa because her eyes were visible, but in the middle of a Missouri summer she was otherwise enveloped in heavy black cloth from head to toe. If the religion required both sexes to cover up, I’d still think “religion’s dumb” (I’m an atheist), but it wouldn’t offend me to nearly the same degree.
Not really sure if I have a point in relation to this -
however, most of the Islamic requirements have strong exceptions for health and well-being reasons,
so I’m not seeing why the reverse wouldn’t be true for face covering laws
My point wasn’t meant to be about whether religious regulations have health exemptions, or about whether some religious regulations discriminate by gender. It was that many people defended banning religiously-required clothing on the grounds that they thought it was Wrong for anyone to hide their face when out in public; but I haven’t seen anybody at all complaining about face masks on those grounds.
I am vehemently opposed to anyone being forced to wear religious garb, and I don’t wear any myself (except in the sense that the prohibition in my society against women going topless is originally religiously based.) But I don’t think it’s any of my business to tell anyone they have to expose parts of their bodies that they don’t want to expose; and I think it’s become pretty clear that the argument that hiding faces poses a public danger wasn’t the real reason for such objections.
You were right. If this website is correct, March sales were the highest ever recorded, and handguns made up the largest portion ever.
I wonder who’s buying them? None of my hunting/gun-enthusiast friends are buying anything right now. The only people I know are one family of far-left relatives who have apparently changed their minds. Previously anti-gun, anti-hunting but now both have handguns and are trying to get carry permits. Not sure their choice was Covid-driven though.
People staying home has impacted the vibrations of the planet. That’s pretty amazing.