Posted on 03/08/2020 4:59:57 PM PDT by ncalburt
Canada hasn’t shut down its borders from European flights.
The true culprit is the virus. Living in a free country(you know what I mean) means dealing with the virus, not minimizing more liberties. Just a suckly deal for rich,poor,liberals, and conservatives.
The only logical reason is that we cannot. E.g. we are not equipped. Testing blood requires a test kit and it requires staffing to screen the tests. And we probably have a hell of a lot more incoming flights than just about any other country in the world. Maybe Paris has a lot of flights too, but it’s all coming into maybe 3 airports. Easier to manage. We have international flights coming into maybe 100+ airports?
I suppose we could set up automated blood pressure and heart rate machines but that’s going to just red flag a lot of people unnecessarily; and force everyone to touch the same surfaces repeatedly. How many people have high blood pressure, esp coming off a plane and walking a terminal? That would just give you something like a 30% false positive reading, and require even more staffing.
I am not sure what the tests can do and if they can be self administered. Just taking a temperature reading using one of those non-contact devices might be the easiest first step but again, need to staff up and equip every port of entry. No easy task. But if this continues to spiral out of control, I am sure they will take additional steps.
In case you don’t know, J. Robinson has fixed it so we can have long titles now.
Are they actually stopping all incoming travel? Or just testing incoming travelers?
I think it is too early to panic. Worst case is you just shut it all down for a couple of weeks and let the virus die off. In a country of 350 million we have only 500 known cases. I’m sure the real number is higher but still, that’s pretty damn low. I’d worry about places like NYC, where millions of people gather on trains and buses every day.
With NYC an exception, other countries have other cultures, a different view of hygiene, more crowded areas, more human interaction etc. In Europe the customary greeting is to kiss each other on the cheek. Here, even shaking hands is going out of favor. In Japan they just bow, not touch. I saw a video, its anecdotal, but people in Iran lining up to lick some kind of religious shrine. That kind of activity is sure going to cause disease to spread. We’ve grounded flights from hot zones that’s a good first step. We’ve taken planes and even cruise ships out of service if someone infected. We have a very good system to track the history of infected people to see where they have been and who they may have contacted so they can be tested by relative risk, and quarantined for caution if needed. I saw that an entire street block in Sacramento was shut down and all the residents quarantined for about 8 hours while police and health inspectors tried to trace the victims’ activities.
I agree we should do more. And I suspect more will be done. We just got $8.3 billion in new funding. This will be a good test to see if government can actually implement real and effective programs, or if its just going to seep into the political rot. Give me $8 billion, I’d re-route every incoming international flight to one of just a handful of airports, have every passenger coming into America tested for temperature; I’d set up primary, secondary and tertiary quarantine zones in those airports; and put doctors and nurses on staff at overtime if need be. It’s not that hard to do - but will we do it?
And forget all about you.
I commute there most every day on Metro North. I'll be back on the train tomorrow morning.
Now back in early January, I had a pretty nasty flu. I was able to function but it was like no other flu I had before. A fever, a lot of coughing and congestion. Now in the past, I would get a flu every 2-3 years and I could always "smell" the flu. It's hard to describe but there would be a certain odor my nose would detect that screamed FLU. I did not have that this time.
Many people in my office had it as well. This was early to mid January, just before the corona-virus became a big story but well after it first surfaced in China. I should mention also that a LOT of flights come into JFK from China. I'm talking several flights an hour (before most of it got shut down last month). So I'm thinking it's possible a wave of this already came through NYC and it never got reported.
Thank you for the translation from Gibberish to English.
Poster’s note: Copy and paste the headline to avoid errors. FR now accepts long headlines.
Who wrote the caption. Not so good in English grammar
Much better than the Pidgen English that was being used.
Interesting. I’m glad you’ve recovered from whatever it was. I am certain (and it should be obvious) there are many undiagnosed cases. People get sick and get over it millions of times every year. You could be right and that a wave of it already blew through before anyone even thought to wonder if it was COVID-19... but then again all flus are viruses of one form or another. This COVID-19 happens to be newsworthy for a lot of reasons. It doesn’t appear as of yet to be particularly more deadly than other viruses.
I’m on the other coast, but I was in NYC in December (stopped in the city to see some old friends for the weekend) then had to take Metro North to Bethpage for a business meeting, just past Hicksville. I wondered if the town was founded by a man named Hicks, or if that’s where the word hick comes from?
Metro North serves commuters from Connecticut and Upstate NY. LIRR serves commuters coming from Long Island. And finally, we have NJ Transit serving commuters from NJ. Each of these three commuter railroads alone are bigger than any other commuter railroad in the nation. Then you have the NYC subway which is the largest subway in the nation. So a lot of trains here!
I suspect that many people with your general history will be found to have had COVID-19 after the damn test kits have been widely distributed.
Reminds me of the rule from Samuel Shem's "The House of God":
10. If you don't take a temperature, you can't find a fever.
I thought something like that... reminds me of the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West, where the man buys up some desert land and everyone thought he was crazy, but he knew it had well water and that the steam train railroad was being built in his direction.
Yes, lots of trains in the NY Metro area. I made a mistake when I looked it up and stayed at a hotel near Grand Central Terminal - fortunately I walked over the day before to buy the ticket when they told me I needed to go to Penn Station to catch the LIRR. Had I not done that I might have shown up at the wrong station and missed my train.
Doesn’t seem like anyone is in a state of panic yet, which is good. Hopefully they’ve stepped up the sanitation efforts a bit, a little more beach spraying couldn’t hurt. I just remember standing in Penn Station and how crowded it was, people standing around waiting for their platform announcement, and then crowding to get onto the escalators.
Even the Dunkin Donuts line was 25 people deep (the place across the way had coffee too, and no line, so I went there duh). The train itself was clean and efficient. I haven’t been on the NYC subway in decades.
Stay safe and be well.
We can argue about the risk of the virus but there should be agreement that there is much more that we could be doing.
” I could always “smell” the flu. “
An olfactory aura. Sentry sensations are not that unusual. Some people get a feeling in their front teeth. Caused by early colonization of the afferent nerves by the virus.
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