In NJ they have made it mandatory to wear a mask in all stores. For employees or visitors. Also all stores are only allowed to be at 50 percent capacity. They have officially closed all parks a day or two ago, but most were already all closed.

https://medium.com/@jurgenthoelen/belgian-dutch-study-why-in-times-of-covid-19-you-can-not-walk-run-bike-close-to-each-other-a5df19c77d08

A Dutch-Belgian study on how a virus is spread out in the open and on how much distance is needed in order to prevent a spread:

Hospitalizations are in decline in WA and the emergency field hospitals that were constructed in Seattle are being moved elsewhere in the country without having seen a single patient.

I don't want to make broad assumptions about the trajectory of this pandemic, but things are starting to look better in my neck of the woods.

Regarding the psychological effects of the pandemic
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconvers ... her-134528

A couple updates from my state:

1. Starting Saturday, all workers at front-facing businesses must wear some kind of mask or face covering when on the job, and state officers will be spot checking businesses unannounced to ensure compliance. Lack of compliance will lead to penalties and fines.

2. Yesterday, RI started a small business forgivable loan program just for the state with $10 million provided by Goldman Sachs. The $10 million was 100% depleted in less than one day.

3. My wife’s job sent us a letter saying it was discontinuing its policy of matching employee contributions to 401k plans, even though they’re staying open for some ungodly reason. She doesn’t have a 401k there, but I’m interested in finding out how many more companies are doing this.

The Flabby Fruit is defunding the WHO. Laugh/Cry emoji.

You guys have a real problem with your president, and that problem can quickly affect the world.

Who else just got their Coronabucks?

I did!

Roger roger

I have NOT received any such check- and I dont know if we will for a while, if ever. The mail has been really slow though, lately.
I just paid my taxes the other day though. Thanks to Trump's tax cuts, I now pay hundreds of dollars in taxes instead of getting a refund like I used to- because (like most people) I don't earn enough money to benefit from those tax cuts (but thats another topic.)

In Idaho, we still have access to the outdoors and trails- for now at least- and that has been my only thing keeping me sane. I know in a lot of other places, pretty much any outdoor activity that involves stepping off of paved streets is now illegal, so I feel lucky there. Our quarantine order has been extended till May 1; it was supposed to expire today but nobody really expected that to happen. It's too soon. New cases are dropping here, though, so there is some sign that all of this is helping.

I am from India. The Northeastern states. Here we have a total of only 80 cases only. Rest of India the cases have gone up to 12000 as of Today. Many researchers are baffled as to how so less people have been affected here inspite of a population of 1.3 Billion. And many researchers have agreed to one thing that this is because of BCG Vaccine. In India, BCG vaccine is given to everyone. In most countries though this vaccine is not used. Many researchers believe that because of this vaccine the immunity of our people against CoVID - 19 is higher then other countries.

I hope countries incorporate this vaccine in order to save more lives.

India has among the lowest rates of tests, though, sitting at just below 200 tests per 1M population. Makes any comparison to countries with thousands to tens of thousands of tests per 1M pop difficult. Impossible to say whether the number of people infected really *is* significantly lower in India, or whether there's just a much smaller portion of the infected actually being recognized as such and thus appearing in the statistics.

The UK also gets the BCG, so it's not that.

Well, yes the number of tests are low but millions of people are in Home Quarantine. And incredibly, without so many tests we are doing pretty okay. *fingers crossed* We are in the world's biggest lockdown since 23rd March. So, technically the Covid graph is going downwards. Lesser new cases.

It's definitely not the cure for the disease but according to many it sure helps in fighting against COVID -19.

And some of our patients have been cured by HIV & AIDS medications. How cool is that

And now something a little closer to home for all of us: Wacken 2020 was just announced to be cancelled.

https://www.wacken.com/en/news-details/ ... cancelled/

Yeah, this part was made public yesterday:

Suffice to say that this should be a barometer for all other events in Europe, though everyone is still holding on unto the last few days before their schedules to do anything. Here Rock in Rio was cancelled but every other summer festival hasn't because everybody's playing chicken with time.

A mosh pit with people standing 1.5 meters apart is just not worth it.

Captain Tom Moore's 100th Birthday Walk for the NHS
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tomswalkforthenhs
He has raised over 15 mio pounds already. Not bad for such a young fella.

The sooner they pull the plug on big events, the more time the planners will have to salvage the situation and get refunds. Lockdowns probably won't last until the end of the year, but I highly doubt there are going to be any huge events of hundreds to thousands of people until 2021. Praying that your big convention or festival will still happen in Summer or Autumn is a fool's hope, even if they're not technically banned or cancelled hardly anyone will want to attend.

Black metal festival ?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/16/coronavirus-live-news-cases-worldwide-top-2-million-trump-doubts-china-death-toll?page=with:block-5e98b0658f0895d83068f7ca#block-5e98b0658f0895d83068f7ca

Fiction vs. reality.

A teaser of when Trump fires Fauci over Twitter in the future.

Opening up by May 1, y'all! The darkest days are behind us! Nothing more can go wrong now!

https://nypost.com/2020/04/16/trump-unv ... -for-may-1

He keeps playing chicken and flinching when the governors and medical experts don't. I expect the governors that had the sense of shutting down earlier will pick a more reasonable endgame date.

My state is saying we'll reopen on May 8th. I guarantee you that the reopening will get pushed back another month, and probably more. It'll look really fucking bad for everybody if places begin to reopen in 2-3 weeks and then infections spike. May is way too early to do any kind of reopening.

Most everything ought to remain shut down until the middle of 2021. This May is not realistic.

The problem with that is that capitalism will not tolerate a closed economy for the next year-plus. We'll collapse into a depression greater than the 1930s. At the same time, any kind of reopening will cause infections to spike and reset the curve. The US is absolutely going to get hit with at least another wave of coronavirus at some point after this current wave slows down, but the virus is not going to be completely gone until a vaccine is found, which every reputable disease expert is saying will not happen until the mid-end of 2021. It's the tightest of tight ropes to walk.

Some potentially good news forthcoming. The latest large scale study set to be released soon on remdesivir appears promising:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/ear ... treatment/

Obviously too early to make any guesses about it, but stock futures are jumping pretty much with every index right now due to this news.

How many of you actually believe this virus is a Bio weapon? Many things hint towards that possibility?

There is the problem.

It sounds promising. Just another straw maybe.

I saw a post on Facebook earlier that perfectly summed up the dumbness of reopening the economy this soon. It said, and I quote, “Reopening the economy now is like not finishing your antibiotics because you are starting to feel a little better.” Considering that the most conservative estimate of the US population getting infected is 30% with full social distancing (highest I’ve seen with minimal social distancing is 70%, and highest with zero social distancing is 81%), and the mortality rate is at like 5% now, a good 2-3 million people will die from this at minimum. Reopening at the start of May will increase that number, especially if we follow Trump’s plan and have shit like major sporting events happen this early into the pandemic.

Yeah, the memes have been writing themselves these past two or three days with the protests

All those people will be on ventilators eventually saying how it's the liberals or the Jews or whoever who are at fault.

I'm curious what people are telling their loved ones about the expected "return to normalcy," particularly loved ones who depend on them and aren't able to fully grasp what's going on. In my case, that would be a sibling with a developmental disability, with whom I share a living space, and whose daily life I help manage. Essentially everything in this person's life outside the home, which included regularly scheduled activities four or five days a week, has been put on hold; we don't leave except when I order take-out meals and such. Visitors are family-only and outdoors, or friends via video-conferencing.

Despite a warm, positive, exceptionally easy-going disposition on the part of this individual, I feel that a lot is being demanded, and I may or may not be projecting more sadness, restlessness, and frustration than there actually is. But already in March I was hearing the hopeful comments, "I'll get to see my friends again in April," and now, "I'll get to see my friends again in May" - it's heartwrenching, but I've had to say what I know, which is, "I don't know. No one knows."

Judging from this few-weeks-old article, maybe the thing to say is that we may soon regain parts of our normal lives, bit-by-bit...but we should be prepared to wait several months overall, if not (as I suspect is pretty unlikely) a couple years. That last bit would be extremely difficult to break to someone who can't have more than a limited grasp of the situation.

I'm going to say, the protests look ridiculous, on one hand we have night of the living brain-dead (I thought it was a picture of a movie with MAGA hats and the like added on at first) and on the other, we have the obese guys in Michigan wearing "tactical" gear, rifles and red caps.

But there is something behind these protesters: the support people receive in the US compared to elsewhere is absolute dogshit. They need work more than people elsewhere. I don't know each of them's personal circumstances, I'm sure some, probably even many of them are just agitated by pundits and conspiracy theorists, but at least some have a very real need and it's hard not to sympathize with them. That doesn't mean that assembling and manifesting with rifles is a good idea.

Now obviously, there is an absolutely fucking disconnect where these people are almost invariably Trump supporters - the guy who's mainly responsible for said dogshit support. And of course, reopening the economy soon means there'll be a bigger second wave.

Trump is awful, but honestly the US has had systemic problems for decades because our politicians prefer to give to the wealthy and withhold from the poor out of some misguided notion that people don't want handouts or that giving too much makes them lazy, etc. It's been a long train of problems.

Some of these protesters are likely idiot Trumpers, but a lot of them probably do have legit grievances about the lack of support. Here in Florida the unemployment system is such awful worthless shit that like only 4 percent of people have actually gotten benefits from it. It was built rigged so people couldn't file and the numbers would look better for the governor.

I made this this morning and it seems relevant:

Oh yeah, the US system wasn't made to support a situation like this. I was merely talking about the emergency support provided, but it wouldn't be so bad if they had better structures underneath, and Trump isn't the only issue here.