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[Reelya]

The thing is, that's what "separation of powers" results in. The reason USA went off the rails is that separation of powers was weakened over time, then when Clownface took over, he found the system easy to break. Clownface is America's Putin. The problem with a strongman is you don't know if you're going to get a Trump, a Putin, a Maduro or a Napoleon. Or a Hitler.

The system is designed to prevent any one person accumulating too much power, therefore no one person can be too effective. And arguably, that system beat all other systems, including all Strongman systems. That's why "Make America Great Again" is such a bad joke. The guy is dismantling the institutions that made America great in the first place, and is openly emulating the optics used by the tinpot dictators that fell by the wayside, such as tank parades.

Russia didn't fail because they brought in liberal democracy, it failed because they didn't build the institutions which are the bedrock of that system. You have to have the (all relatively) free press, independent judiciary, high education, good social fabric to even get started. Then you can have elections. The problem with America was that the social fabric and separation of powers have both eroded, allowing a Strongman to take control (by blind luck, not intelligent enough to seize control). The problem with Russia is that those institutions weren't really there to start with, with similar results.

[coalboat]

Putin just edited their law in order to rule for another millenium and Xi just visited the hospitals in Wuhan televisionally.

Both are probably very optimistic about their health.

[wierd]

We are now on "Essential employees only" for our visitation policies at work.  No active cases that we know of yet. (yet.)  Looks like the brass is taking it seriously though.

Maybe we will keep darling children out after all.

[Reelya]

Looks like today's new cases is going to be a record-breaker for the USA!

[Cthulhu]

The governor of maryland is on TV saying it's too late for testing and they're probably going to stop soon.  He looks like somebody's got a gun to the back of his head.

Buckle up.

[Guardian G.I.]

While all other countries in Eastern Europe (except Russia, and even they are reconsidering) are in full "shut down everything" mode, Belarus is pretty much "business as usual" with 27 confirmed cases. Schools and universities remain open, public events still take place - the Ministry of Healthcare only "recommends" to suspend them until early April. Authorities believe that they can contain COVID-19, despite cases like "an infected man hid the fact that he visited Northern Italy from border guards, and then went to several public events", which resulted in 91 people recieving a visit by paramedics in hazmat suits (and two weeks off in quarantine).
Countries with much better healthcare systems are struggling, and yet we are seemingly on top of this situation. I don't quite believe this...

Also, reportedly our medics carried out more than 10k coronavirus tests so far, which is more than in America. That's odd.

[Reelya]

Some articles were saying the number of virus cases doubles every 6.4 days. But, then I took a look at their reasoning and realized they don't understand the math, and it's potentially worse than that.

What they found was that the generation time averaged at 6.4 days, meaning the time to spread from one host to another. but remember that each person infects 2.4 people, not two people, so every 6.4 days the number of active infections goes up by a factor of 2.4.And this still doesn't count total infections, since you also have to keep track of everyone who was infected before, not just the x 2.4 new cases.

Previously, I guesstimated the generation time at 10 days.
So running the numbers again with the shorter generation time, then after 64 days, a single spreader will have created ... 10868 total victims.
The base rate for active infections increasing is 14.66% per day = doubling active infections every 5 days.

So right now we want to work out at what point would 100% of Americans have been infected. Adding some more spreadsheet rows ... that's around day 137 if there was only one point of origin.
You know what, maybe that's what Trump meant by saying the next 8 weeks are critical ... perhaps he already knows everyone will have had it within the next 8 weeks.

[MaximumZero]

My homestate in the US suspended school for a month.

Michigan just did this today.

[Ulfarr]

Greece is getting closer to a full lockdown boys and girls 

The goverment issued a new order, closing pretty much everything that has a potential to gather any amount of people. So far the only bussinesses that are allowed to operate are small (individual) shops, delivery/take-away only restaurants/cafes/etc, public/private health care institutes, and (super)markets. And with the possible exemption of public hospitals, everything else must take any meassure necessary to avoid servicing more than 5 people at the same time.

Spoiler: And a bit of humor within this whole shitstorm (click to show/hide)

https://youtu.be/8apayeoBM8U

(loose) Translation:
"Watch out for coronavirus,
take your car and forget about the subway,
put on a mask to play doctor
at night take a bath in antiseptic"

"Here comes the virus straight from China,
and the whole world goes into quarantine.
Shelves are empty, terror in the media
Within Greece, all Carnivals got cancelled"

"Watch out for coronavirus,
take your car and forget about the subway,
put on a mask to play doctor
at night take a bath in antiseptic"

Edit: wrong link

[Reelya]

You know the reason Tom Hanks got the disease in Australia?

He had a slight cough already and complained about it, and an Aussie said "That's not a virus" *cough* *cough* "that's a virus"

[scriver]

Somebody in my store had left a corona bottle on a shelf way off from the beer isle yesterday, so I put it back. A minute later I had the brilliant idea of taking a photo of it where it stood in the middle of the canned foods and captioning it "Remember to watch out for customers spreading corona everywhere".

But alas, it was too late. Quick wit is not my forte.

[McTraveller]

A thought experiment:  What is the time limit on which growth can appear exponential before starting the S-turn to look logistic?

What I mean is this:  with a constraint that human populations generally live on a surface, interactions can only occur in two dimensions.  Thus people only have "access" to other people within some physical radius over a given population.  When you have a small number of people infected, the perimeter of the area they cover each day is pretty large compared to its area - so the "new people" they touch is large and infection growth rate is high.

But the more people are infected, the perimeter of exposure starts getting less and less compared to the area.  People inside the area are already exposed, and people outside are not.  Put another way - if you are inside a geographic region where exposure is high, isn't R0 mathematically guaranteed to be reduced, since each person has less opportunity to infect a unique person (that is, each infected is "competing" with more uninfected to infect).

This means that infection rate is limited by the "mixing rate" of people at the perimeter.  If people can travel far (e.g., via airplane) and start new infection areas, this increases perimeter to surface area again and so can look like "faster" growth for a while.  Or is the perimeter the "exposure" radius, with a growth rate constrained to something like R^2, but since "activity" is delayed, when the active exposures appear, they really are always "exponential" until they catch up with the exposure boundary?

[Lidku]

Welp China is at it full breaks with propaganda saying that the US is the origination of the virus and insinuating we made, despite the first case of the virus was in November 2019. They tried to cover it up, detained whistleblowers, cremated the majority of their deaths so their death could be fibbed, and now they are blaming the US.

First they did it with Italians by saying they got "return" cases from Italians going to China (wtf would anyone go to China in a middle of a virus crisis?), then they used their corrupt influence to have media houses bash Iran and saying they've been hiding their numbers (Even though Iran is way more honest than China). Not only that China is known for botched safety protocols- SARS literally escaped from their facilities two times. Now the virus (which was in China since November 2019) main epicentre was in literally in Wuhan, Hubei. The same province and same city as China's only BSL4-Laboratory. CCP is a danger to humanity.

[wierd]

Hooray!  Possibly exposed today!

(/sarcasm)

In the endless search for more profit, the facility accepted a new resident from a local hospital that has had active COVID patients there.
She was reporting a cough and a sore throat this morning. Awesome. 

We shall see.

[dragdeler]

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