Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I picked up my ‘kids’ (adults) and we all voted early: just in case one of us got sick or things got scary-violent on Election Day.
Well, this is exactly why I tried to take as much care as possible after I came home from traveling. Seems mostly like common sense, but I suppose this kind of thing still needs to be said.
My company does quite a lot of side-chatter in slack (but mostly in channels that you can tune out of) and voice/video calls. We also have (except this year) a couple of annual meetups/retreats - usually one full-company (that’s mostly social) and one for each team in the company (that’s half work, half-social). When we had an office, remote people who were traveling would occasionally drop in and hang out. So you’d usually met most people face-to-face within 3-6 months.
Having the founders and upper management all working remotely (from different states even) really sets the tone for the whole company to accept it, understand it, and do it rather well.
Having it all be virtual this year is nice. Although I mostly have fun when I’m there, I don’t like having to travel and be away from home and family and routine, even if it’s just a week here and there and a couple days here and there.
Common sense is what prevents most people from doing that.
Always beware of common sense and common knowledge.
“Those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wrote earlier this month.
Yes they bloody well should, because they are negligent scumbags who deserve shame, scorn and ridicule.
Also, every elected official or person with any influence whatsoever who says that should be shamed right out of whatever position of authority they have, forever.
For instance, the most recent report obtained by NPR, dated Oct 27, lists cities where hospitals are filling up, including the metro areas of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore, where in-patient hospital beds are over 80% full. It also lists specific hospitals reaching max capacity, including facilities in Tampa, Birmingham and New York that are at over 95% ICU capacity and at risk of running out of intensive care beds.
In reviewing the analysis obtained by NPR, Panchadsaram says the local and hospital-level data HHS is collecting would be very useful to researchers and health leaders. “That stuff isn’t easy to find at a national level,” he says. “There’s no one place [publicly] you can go to get all that data.”
About 24% of U.S. hospitals are using more than 80% of their ICU capacity, based on reporting from nearly 5,000 “priority facilities,” and more hospitals have joined their ranks in recent weeks.
Health data experts NPR consulted had ideas on how to improve the analysis. For instance, Panchadsaram suggested that some of the county-level charts, currently presented as raw numbers, would be more useful if analyzed per capita. “You really need to adjust it to the number of people [in an area] to get a sense of where things are being overwhelmed,” he says.
And the quality of the underlying data is a concern. Health experts say the data quality was compromised by a controversial shift in data collection from the CDC to HHS in July, and that the issues with data quality have not been fully resolved.
And the HHS is hiding regional data from the public, under the claim of “protecting privacy”.
Oh, come on, 2020. Take a break already.
Um, I have no idea why this reads “The Oakland Press” when I got it from the Macomb Daily…same publisher, different counties, I guess?
I wonder if Trump can blame this on China too.
I’m sure he’d be just as happy to blame it on the EU.
November 5th and we’re still talking about it.
He led the funeral of the church’s most senior cleric in Montenegro, 82-year-old Amfilohije Radovic, on Sunday.
Mourners gathered at the event without masks and many kissed the bishop’s body as it lay in an open coffin.
I really DON’T understand kissing a dead body. I’ve seen family members do it, in fact.
Boy, that sure took long enough.
Until pretty recently, it was the family that washed and cared for the dead prior to burial and we had wakes in our homes. Much of the rest of the world still does this. It’s modern America that’s generally weird about dead bodies now, not other places. In most cases, handling a dead body is perfectly safe. Obvious when dealing with an infectious disease, that might not be the case… obviously, given that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, they should not have been kissing and touching the body, but in normal times, it’s not necessarily dangerous, just not normal practice anymore for many Americans.
Oct 21:
And now:
Yep, that timeline looks just about right. And that election night party is probably going to be yet another spreader event.
My spouse is now self-quarantining because one of her coworkers tested positive for COVID-19 after being out sick Friday. 
The county coronavirus hotline told her rapid tests have too many false negatives to be reliable, so she scheduled the full test for as soon as possible, which is Thursday.