{ if you or someone nearby are being brutalized by a police Spot robot and can get a hand or something underneath, grab this handle and yank it forward. This releases the battery, instantly disabling the robot. | sleep paralysis demon | Continue reading }
Pushing away feelings is like trying to force a beach ball underwater: They will pop back up. Instead, notice and normalize difficult emotions; ideally, negative feelings, including fear, can motivate us to solve problems. […]
Focusing on relaxing sounds reduces stress. […]
Slow your breathing down to six breaths a minute by consciously inhaling and exhaling (to practice this timing, you can use a secondhand and inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, and repeat four times, or try a guided recording). Paced breathing offers a host of physiological benefits, like reducing your blood pressure, which helps promote a sense of tranquillity.
How Fear Can Spread Like a Virus
TV medical dramas gives their masks to hospitals to help fight the coronavirus
99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says
[social distancing] will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced. [Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team | PDF]
Antiviral drugs that had held promise as a potential treatment for the coronavirus did not work in one of the first major studies in seriously ill patients, researchers from China reported on Wednesday. “No benefit was observed,” the researchers wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study tested Kaletra, a combination of two antiviral medicines, lopinavir and ritonavir, that are normally used to treat H.I.V.
The better we get at interventions to identify and isolate specific people with the virus, the less we should need to rely on interventions that isolate the entire population. […] South Korea and Singapore have been successfully addressing their coronavirus epidemics with less extensive social-distancing measures than are currently seen in Italy, France, and parts of the U.S., in part because of their effective testing and surveillance regimes. The Financial Times reports today on the town of Vò, Italy, which successfully stopped its local outbreak though a strategy that involved widespread testing of the population and isolation of those who tested positive, even as the rest of Northern Italy did not fare so well. […]
It is also possible that effective antiviral treatments to treat the sick will be available much sooner than a vaccine that protects the healthy. This is partly because ongoing trials are testing whether already existing antiviral drugs, approved and on the market to fight other viruses, can reduce the severity of COVID-19 and save lives.
Evidence is starting to emerge that temperature and humidity do make a difference in the ability of the virus to infect large numbers. […]
Some Southeast Asian nations with close business and tourism links to China have seen surprisingly few cases, even if you assume their less developed public health systems are missing infections. Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have each seen fewer cases than Estonia, Slovenia or Iceland, despite a combined population more than 100 times as large. […] In extreme cold and very hot and wet conditions the virus is “largely absent,” the researchers from Spain, Portugal and Finland wrote, meaning that people in tropical and polar climates are unlikely to see local transmission of cases. […]
Another pre-print study by four Beijing-based researchers uploaded to the arXiv server last week comes to a similar conclusion after analyzing the infection rates in 100 Chinese cities. […]
Both studies are still just computer models, and neither has been through peer review. On top of that, even a reduced rate of infection will only slow, rather than halt the spread of this pandemic.
related:
Bidet sales soar as toilet paper sells out amid coronavirus fears
Surveillance Company Says It’s Deploying ‘Coronavirus-Detecting’ Cameras in US
– To protect yourself, sanitize your hands immediately before eating and immediately after touching things touched by others to avoid getting viruses.
– To protect others, use clean hands to touch others’ things or when handling things to others.
– Sanitize objects given to you and only pass objects that have passed your own cleanliness test to others. For example, I have my hand sanitizer bottle open and ready to clean my credit card immediately after I get them back from cashiers, before I put it back in my wallet.
– Sanitize smooth surfaces you are going to touch directly with your hands (e.g. tables and chair edges, places where you set down your phone and computer). Use paper towels to turn off faucets and open bathroom doors.
– To keep the number of times I have to sanitize, I keep track of whether clean objects and hands stay clean. As long as my hands or my objects have not encountered unknown/dirty things after their last cleaning, they don’t need to be recleaned. This is why I suggest immediate sanitation of hands after touching things of unknown cleanliness, so you can resume using your clean things without worry.
– Sanitization can be done by soap and water (hands) or hand sanitizer (hands or objects) or windex (objects)
– Finally, if your hands are clean, you can touch your face.
[…]
– I’d suggest not eating prepared salads or sandwiches. There may be no evidence that these are risky, but I prefer my foods cooked anyway.
– Don’t share food, obviously.
– Go outside – sunlight is the best disinfectant.
[…]
– 50% of people with virus have no symptoms but will
become immune just like most infected people– 95% don’t need to go to the hospital
{ Michael Lin, | Continue reading }
We need to stop picturing that ubiquitous “flatten the curve” chart and start imagining a roller coaster. […]
No one knows for sure how long social distancing will have to last to reduce the spread to near zero. But if South Korea and China are appropriate exemplars, we’ll need to stay apart now for at least eight weeks, and maybe more. China locked down Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province on Jan. 23. Today, provincial officials are reporting few or no new cases of the virus. Just a few days ago, they closed the last of their 16 makeshift emergency hospitals. Consequently, restrictions are easing. Schools and offices are slowly opening. People are beginning to go out and see other people. […]
A likely scenario is that there will be subsequent waves of the disease. […] The next round of social distancing will be activated more rapidly, because officials — and the public — will be more prepared. It should also be shorter, because we can assume that most of the people who were initially infected are likely to be immune next time around. But it will still disrupt people’s lives and the economy. We will still have canceled conferences and sporting events. People will not frequent restaurants and will not travel. The service industry will be severely curtailed. And it’s going to happen again and again.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
Countermeasures in Wuhan and elsewhere have already reduced the local R0 of COVID-19, with research suggesting the R0 was reduced all the way down to 0.32 in Wuhan in early February after extensive testing and containment measures. In Italy, which implemented aggressive countermeasures fairly late into their local epidemic, preliminary analysis suggests the R0 was reduced from 3 in late February to 1.7 in early March and the number of new cases has dramatically slowed down.
According to an analysis published in the Lancet, approximately 95% of the Wuhan population remained uninfected by the virus at the end of January, after the peak of their crisis, as a result of aggressive countermeasures. These data on their own indicate that herd immunity is not an inevitable outcome, nor is the possibility that up to 80% of the UK population will be infected within the next year.
Israeli Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt said most people are naturally immune, and that since the infection rate in China is slowing down, “the end of the pandemic is near.” […]
“The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30% each day — that is a scary statistic. […] Had the growth continued at that rate, the whole world would have become infected within 90 days. […] In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after some time most passengers will either be infected or immune.”
[…]
The Diamond Princess cruise ship represented the worst-case scenario in terms of disease spread, as the close confines of the ship offered optimal conditions for the virus to be passed among those aboard. “Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu,” Levitt said. Based on those figures, his conclusion was that most people are simply naturally immune.
However, that doesn’t mean Levitt is dismissive of the precautions being put in place by governments around the world.
{ Jerusalem Post | Continue reading }
Researchers found that the novel coronavirus could be detected on
Copper for up to four hours
Cardboard for up to 24 hours
Plastic and stainless steel for up to two to three days.Also, the coronavirus could linger in aerosols — the suspension of tiny particles or droplets in the air — for up to three hours.
more:
Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1
If you can smell what someone had for lunch — garlic, curry, etc. — you are inhaling what they are breathing out, including any virus in their breath. […]
After numerous people who attended a Buddhist temple in Hong Kong fell ill, the city’s Center for Health Protection collected samples from the site. Restroom faucets and the cloth covers over Buddhist texts tested positive for coronavirus, the agency said. […]
A study of other coronaviruses found they remained on metal, glass and plastic for two hours to nine days.
Whether a surface looks dirty or clean is irrelevant. If an infected person sneezed and a droplet landed on a surface, a person who then touches that surface could pick it up. How much is required to infect a person is unclear.
Coronaviruses are relatively easy to destroy, Professor Whittaker said. Using a simple disinfectant on a surface is nearly guaranteed to break the delicate envelope that surrounds the tiny microbe, rendering it harmless.
photo { Franco Fontana, Houston People, 1985 }
Most estimates suggest 80% of COVID-19 cases are mild and feel roughly like a flu. Estimates I have seen suggest that roughly 10-15% of cases will be more significant and may necessitate hospital visits (see also) with 1-3% potentially needing an ICU. The concern of many governments is the peak number of cases that occur in a given moment. […]
The reported death rate has hovered around 2% but may in reality be 0.2% to 1% depending on country and healthcare system. Many estimates tend to indicate an overall expected mortality rate of ~0.5% globally. The current existing fatality rate is biased upwards by Wuhan cases dominating the mix (which are closer to a 3-4% death rate and make up most cases). It is possible the virus is being undertested for in China / rest of world driving the real death rate down (as many more people are infected than is reported). […]
R0 value: The spread rate of the virus seems to be well over 2 and likely ~3. This means for every person infected at least 2 to 3 more get the disease.
{ EladGil | Continue reading }
Experts think there may be many people with no symptoms at all, or such mild ones that they never bother to seek medical attention. Because those cases have not been counted, it’s not possible now to know the real proportion of mild versus severe cases. […]
After viral infections, people generally develop antibodies in their blood that will fight off the virus and protect them from contracting it again. It’s reasonable to assume that people who have had the new coronavirus will become immune to it.
But it is not known how long that immunity will last. With other coronaviruses, which cause the common cold, immunity can wane.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
The best estimates so far suggest that Covid-19 kills about 1% of people it infects. That number may go up somewhat or fall significantly; either way it could add up to a dreadful toll.
If 60% of the world’s population is ultimately infected, as suggested by Gabriel Leung, chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, a 1% fatality rate would kill almost 50 million people — similar to the 1918 Spanish flu. If that falls to 0.1%, it could still be roughly 10 times more fatal than the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, which killed several hundred thousand in its first year. […]
The most severe period of initial infection could soon be fading. Respiratory diseases flourish in the cold season and taper off as the weather warms up. That should cause infection rates to slow in the northern hemisphere, while continuing at a lower level in tropical regions and spiking in temperate parts of the southern hemisphere where winter will be setting in. When a new year rolls around, the bulk of the disease will shift back to the northern hemisphere, to begin the cycle again.
Subsequent Covid-19 seasons probably won’t be as serious. Those who survive viruses should be immune from reinfection (though there have been reports of people being diagnosed with Covid-19 for a second time), and as the share of survivors in the population rises, it gets harder for a disease to spread. […]
In a best-case scenario, it’s even possible that vaccines may be available in not much more than a year.
{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }
The only path to flattening the curve for COVID-19 is community-wide isolation: the more people stay home, the fewer people will catch the disease. The fewer people who catch the disease, the better hospitals can help those who do. […]
Get a flu shot, if you haven’t already, and stock up supplies at home so that you can stay home for two or three weeks, going out as little as possible. […] Here’s a handy, one-page guide on what you need.
related { CoronaCoin: crypto developers seize on coronavirus for new, morbid token }
The ads you see online are based on the sites, searches, or Facebook posts that get your interest. Some rebels therefore throw a wrench into the machinery — by demonstrating phony interests.
“Every once in a while, I Google something completely nutty just to mess with their algorithm,” wrote Shaun Breidbart. “You’d be surprised what sort of coupons CVS prints for me on the bottom of my receipt. They are clearly confused about both my age and my gender.”
[…]
“You never want to tell Facebook where you were born and your date of birth. That’s 98 percent of someone stealing your identity! And don’t use a straight-on photo of yourself — like a passport photo, driver’s license, graduation photo — that someone can use on a fake ID.”
[…]
“Create a different email address for every service you use”
[…]
“Oh yeah — and don’t use Facebook.”
— Persistence
— Talking too much
— Contradictions between words and actions or behaviors
— Triggering your intuition (this doesn’t feel right)
As a reliable general guideline, any time you are engaged in conversation with a stranger and you notice one or more of those characteristics in the conversation, you should expect that you are being scammed.
Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk? […]
Your phone number may have now become an even stronger identifier than your full name. I recently found this out firsthand when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a phone number.
He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.
From there, it could have easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks.
image { Bell telephone magazine, March/April 1971 }
Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours. […]
The best ways to train your body to fall asleep quicker is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even if you don’t have a good night of sleep.
photo { Thomas Prior }
In a series of experiments, students listened to stories and then took a test of how much information they remembered an hour later. Their recall spiked by 10 to 30 percent if they had been randomly assigned to sit and do nothing in a dark, quiet room for a few minutes right after hearing the story. Your mind needs rest and space to consolidate and store information. […]
Don’t bother with rereading or highlighting. Research reveals that they don’t help much. […]
The best way to learn something truly is to teach it.
#the17mstosuccess #richaf #poundinP pic.twitter.com/p413lzVuyk
— kyle Dunnigan (@kyledunnigan) October 11, 2018
a non-comprehensive list of the ways your sleep deprivation is personally harming you:
Your overall cognitive performance — particularly your visual attention and ability to form memories — deteriorates. (More colloquially, this is that “brain fog” we all experience after a late night.)
Your ability to learn new information is impaired, both by sleep deprivation before you learn new information and afterward.
You’re less likely to correctly read facial expressions, even interpreting some expressions — even neutral ones — as threatening.
You’re likely to be more cranky and react worse when presented with obstacles.
Beyond your severely impaired mental abilities, your body is affected,
too: A lack of adequate sleep can contribute to weight gain, puts you at a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, and makes you far less resistant to the common cold. […]
So what are we to do? […]
First, learn how much sleep you need […] the gold standard of eight hours per night might not be right for you […] The only real guideline is to get as much sleep as you need to feel refreshed and energized the next day, and then do that every single night. […]
Fall asleep and wake up at the same time every day (including weekends) […] And don’t forget to keep your bedroom cool.
photo { Brooke Shields photographed by Richard Avedon, New York, January 26, 1988 }
related { Zzzz Poster }
Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It’s just the one people talk about the most. […] Your spouse and others around you matter more to your happiness than the government does. […] Very few of the things that irritate you or bring you joy have anything to do with the government. […]
Go to the party even when you don’t want to. Nine times in 10, you’ll be bored and go home early. But the 10th time, you will have a worthy experience or meet an interesting person. […]
Save 25 percent of your income. […]
That thing you kinda want to do someday? Do it now. […] Don’t wait until you have the time to really relax and enjoy it. That will be approximately three decades from now, and it’s highly possible you won’t be able to enjoy it.
photo { Harry Callahan, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago, 1953 }
Only a FOOL would buy IKEA furniture. Instead I just download instructions and keep emailing their service dept to say that I am missing a piece, until they ship me all the pieces over a six month period
{ @jasonarewhy }
If you write clearly, then your readers may understand your mathematics and conclude that it isn’t profound. Worse, a referee may find your errors. Here are some tips for avoiding these awful possibilities.
1. Never explain why you need all those weird conditions, or what they mean. For example, simply begin your paper with two pages of notations and conditions without explaining that they mean that the varieties you are considering have zero-dimensional boundary. In fact, never explain what you are doing, or why you are doing it. The best-written paper is one in which the reader will not discover what you have proved until he has read the whole paper, if then
2. Refer to another obscure paper for all the basic (nonstandard) definitions you use, or never explain them at all. This almost guarantees that no one will understand what you are talking about
[…]
11. If all else fails, write in German.
photos { Left: William Henry Jackson, Pike’s Peak from the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Midland Series, ca.1880 | Right: Ye Rin Mok }
Lucid dreams are when you know you’re dreaming and you can consciously control events as they unfold: it’s like being the director and star of your own Hollywood movie. It’s estimated that about 20 per cent of people get to enjoy them fairly regularly (at least once a month). For the rest of us, a new study in the journal Dreaming suggests a really simple way to increase your odds of having lucid dreams – just start making more frequent use of the snooze function on your alarm clock.
