We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Just hope you test positive. The more people who test positive, the better for the country. If elederly, overweight, or have other issues, if you test negative you might chose to remain in jail for a while.
Still, I think we'll be surprised by how many people have the covid antibodies already. If you even had a stuffy nose in the past 3 months, you might have the covid antibodies. If you don;t know what they are, read up on them.
The animal body has unbelievable abilities. What is an antibody? Read and learn some basic biology.
Whether with family or friends or alone, in good times or dire, at Passover, still after thousands of years we recall the Exodus, and we thank G-d for helping us to find the strength within and together to persevere in determination to be free and to practice faith. Tonight is the first seder (order of prayers, recollections, food, and songs) for Passover. May all celebrate freedom and faith with perseverance.
Come celebrate with us. (FYI, Chametz is leavened products that we are supposed to cleanse from our homes)
So. when trump was called a "racist" in january for cutting off travel. When the WaPo called his actions "unprecedented"....when he declared a Public Health Emergency to release funds so others/states could react to the virus....ALL IN JANUARY - JANUARY - JANUARY........that was "sitting on his hands" and "making no preparations" for two months???
I get the impression that people are making home-cooked meals during this so-called quarantine. This weekend, I made this: Marcella's beef braised in red wine. Not bad at all, an Italian pot roast I guess.
I agree with him. We need to get business back in business, with reasonable precautions of course. Since this virus will be circulating for years, the political challenge is when. The first patient who dies after opening up will be Trump's fault. Meanwhile, lives are being destroyed.
Now approved by the FDA, but already in use in other countries. The sooner we can get it everywhere here, the better. It might take a week or two. Obviously, if you have recovered from a confirmed case, you are good to go.
Despite the careful caveats in the article, what a positive test basically tells you is that you have been exposed to covid and have immunity to it. That means you have no to minimal risk, and are no risk to anybody else.
What is the purpose of all of these virus recommendations? The masks, the distancing, the stay-at-home, the hospital and nursing home rules?
The purpose is to lower the curve. Not to reduce cases of those made very ill, but to flatten the burden to make medical care more manageable over time: longer, but less intense at the moment.
This particular covid is sneaky - almost always mild-to-nothing, but sometimes lethal for the frail or unlucky. The unlucky part is what makes it scarey. There is no effective protection, in my view, because viruses go viral. Their RNA is their reason for existing.
I'm now about 12 days into my Covid experience, and I'm getting better. I probably thought I was better than I was. I went out and raked for hour yesterday, trying to benefit from fresh air for the first time and get a little exercise. I was pretty wiped out after that. So I'm resting today. I may have the mild version, but it doesn't make it less difficult to recover from.
However, I'm moving into newer territory. The cough is diminished significantly, the headache has eased, and my main issue now is hydration. I seem to be dehydrated no matter what I do. So I drink a lot of water and Gatorade. But my appetite is back, and I'm finally moving more. Sleep is still at a premium...10 hours every night.
My brother also has it. He has a much tougher version, but he also has adult onset diabetes. So he's at-risk. He's struggled much, much more than I have, had many more symptoms, and is fighting it still. He is also getting better, but at a much slower pace. He warned me not to rake yesterday. He was probably right.
What I'm more concerned about now is not my health, but where we go in the post-shutdown world...
I fear we're not going to move in the best directions. Value structures are a mess. The social shaming over this is an example of the worst of what can happen, and I (sadly) see this as something people will engage in more of.
Who is bored at home? Not possible. Snuggle with a spouse partner. Clean a damn closet. Turn off the f-ing TV. Do a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Throw out stuff you never use. Do 300 pushups each day and 100 body-weight squats. Cook something good. Do a Great Courses series. Go for an hour run. Clean the garage. Prune the shrubs. Make some money by working at home if you can.
"Trump ruined our economy and all for naught!" "Trump and his capitalism put millions out of work for nothing! If you haven't already heard this from the "mainstream media" (AKA "fake news"), you soon will...
Most fitness buffs do not have barbells and racks in their garage or barn, much less a fancy home gym. Still, most have bands, hand weights, some dumbells, maybe a kettlebell or two. TRX straps are versatile and take up no space.
Without barbells, it will be difficult to build strength while away from your gym with their heavy weights, so many of us are stuck doing our weights routines in suboptimal fashion. For example, doing floor bench presses with 10 or 15 lb. hand weights cannot compare with barbell bench presses.
The same applies to dumbell deadlifts.
(Generally-speaking, low reps refers to exertions you can only manage to repeat around 6 times, medium reps refers to exertions you can only manage to repeat 6-15 times, and high reps are over 15 times. High-rep exertions, even to failure, do not build strength but build muscle endurance. Low rep exertions build strength but not endurance.)
The point I want to make is that, without access to a good supply of varied serious weights, April might have to be a month of endurance weight training instead of strength-building. Why not? It is better than nothing.
That would entail, for example with lower body, squats with dumbells/hand weights X 20 per set, or dumbell deadlifts X 20, or 20 floor bench presses per set instead of 5-10. These sorts of things will slow the strength loss that occurs after 10 days without heavy weight stress.
Your calisthenics days and cardio days are easy at home or outdoors, so no need to discuss that.
All of the experts, including Dr. Fauci - are bullshitting (pardon my annoyance). Not this guy, because he admits what is unknown. What is known is that this virus can be lethal and it can be completely harmless, and anything inbetween. We know who are most likely to become seriously ill, but what is completely unknown is how often it creates serious illness. Via Powerline, which says:
This video is part of Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge series. His guest is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is an economist as well as a member of Stanford’s medical school faculty. Dr. Bhattacharya has become somewhat famous as a result of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he argued that the danger of COVID-19 is probably being overestimated. The conversation is intelligent; Peter is a good interviewer, and Bhattacharya is an excellent teacher. It is a fair, balanced appraisal. I recommend it.
Things are strange these days without going to church. Yes, it's already Palm Sunday.
Matthew 21:1-11
21:1 When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples,
21:2 saying to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me.
21:3 If anyone says anything to you, just say this, 'The Lord needs them.' And he will send them immediately."
21:4 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
21:5 "Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey."
21:6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them;
21:7 they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.
21:8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.
21:9 The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"
21:10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, "Who is this?"
21:11 The crowds were saying, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.
We do not know the virus death rates. I'll say it again.
We do not know death rates because we do not know infection rates in the US. We would have to do a mass involuntary screening of people on the street to know that. That will not happen. The only numbers we have is positive tests (on people already symptomatic and seeking tests) and deaths.
We do know death numbers (not accurately, because if you had terminal cancer but a corona pneumonia was the final thing, you're a corona death).
One easy piece of information might be interesting, though: number of deaths in, say, Boston for the week beginning April 4 in 2019, and the numbers for the same week in 2020.
A sort-of unusual lady from Northampton, MA - a ghetto of lefties and LGBT culture - reports honestly on her pain (h/t SDA). Losing friends over political disagreements is disgusting:
Another hitherto unknown skill that the media believes it possesses is logistics. “Why hasn’t Trump commanded a million ventilators to appear?!” the reporters demand. It’s pretty easy to see where they might have gotten the idea that the moment one articulates a desire to possess something that it magically appears. Capitalism has pretty much made that a reality. If you want something, you can go to a store and get it 24/7, or you can go on Amazon and it’ll be at your Manhattan apartment in 48 hours. Since they have never built anything or transported anything or distributed anything, only benefited from the labor of the unhip people who do those things, it’s only natural that the delayed adolescents who make up our media class imagine that material goods can be simply wished into being. After all, for all practical purposes during normal times, because of the efforts of Americans they look down upon, material goods pretty much can be simply wished into being. But prosperity takes work, not that the media would know.
Yes, it is stressing hospitals in hot spots, but compared to what? As Bulldog suggested yesterday, this virus is partly a political and media event - not entirely medical as with the past nasty viral epidemics.
As with any viral illness, it's best to protect the frail and elderly. Best, but rarely possible. Numbers are cold things, death is not, but some perspective on the big picture is good.
What we are likely seeing, in my estimation, is an epidemic with a real case fatality rate between 0.2 and 0.5%, which is similar to the 1957 Asian Influenza A:H2N2 or 1968 Hong Kong Influenza A:H3N2 pandemics, which were also essentially virgin field respiratory epidemics. These pandemics rate, not as PSI5 events, but as PSI2 events on the CDC scale. They are certainly atypical and more severe than a PSI1 event (such as a routine seasonal flu epidemic), but not a shattering event like the 1919 influenza A:H1N1 pandemic. These earlier pandemics essentially tripled the number of deaths due to influenza experienced annually, and were posed little long-term economic or other damage to the population despite being handled without the extreme measures that are currently being adopted or proposed by political figures. Like those pandemic events, SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] has its most significant impact on elderly or otherwise compromised individuals, with few fatalities observed in the population under the age of 60. From what we have observed, half of those infected show no symptoms, 40% show mild symptoms such as a cold, and only about 2% advance to serious or critical illness. What is needed now is for politicians and the population to pause, take a deep breath, and address the epidemic with rational measures, such as social distancing of the older population, ring screening around identified cases, quarantine of identified infected individuals, and adequate hospital triage systems to protect other patients and health care staff rom infection in order to preserve our ability to treat the most severe cases.
A yellow fever outbreak
Most fitness buffs do not have barbells and racks in their garage or barn, much less a fancy home gym. Still, most have bands, hand weights, some dumbells, maybe a kettlebell or two. 
Things are strange these days without going to church. Yes, it's already Palm Sunday. 
Corona beer suspends production