well_red

Those "Italians" in NY/NJ immigrated many generations ago. There is such a big community there that they have kept their identity, but I doubt they are traveling to the "old country" very often like Michael Corleone. Probably just common tourist destination for Americans, Chinese, etc.

Ridiculous to pin anything around coronavirus on Trump. I think he acted pretty much in line and in time with all the western heads of state. But he's an egomaniacal buffoon who can't hold his tongue and probably the least capable leader we could have in such a crisis, so he is an easy target. The whole federal government is absolutely broken. Federal oversight was supposed to proactively protect us from foreign terrorists (nope), financial collapse due to greedy and amoral banks (nope), and now global fucking pandemics (nope). At this rate you can bet that Skynet will become a reality and we'll be fighting AI and robots in 10 years.

Sure this will end well: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/06/asia/china-coronavirus-tourist-warning-intl-hnk/index.html

It's a rolling 7 day average after the first day with at least 3 deaths -- probably shouldn't even be plotted for another week or so.

I don't know why they even release the number of known cases, it's completely misleading to compare country to country or even state by state. No one knows how the aggregate number compares to the number of actual infected. Anyway, deaths are a pretty firm measurement, give or take, and scary that we don't look like we even close to a plateau yet:

So I guess the "high floor" that Dipoto and Servais raved about was AA, amazing scouting.

I definitely miss playing online poker. I got into the math and strategy etc and read up a lot and looked up a lot of stuff on two plus two, got decent but definitely a rookie. My bank roll was constantly grind away for a while, turn 100 into 1000 or whatever, then back down to 50 in a night drinking or on tilt. Rinse and repeat. Probably don't have the mentality for the grind, especially since I was playing far below what I could afford so the winnings were meaningless. The low stakes tables get boring after a while and I never wanted to invest more since I was just doing it for fun. Started out on sit-n-go's but the cash games were more fun. I pretty much just played PLO for the last year they were still running online and that was super fun but the variance can be brutal. I'll jump back on if/when it is legalized.

yuck

Last week I felt like I had a very mild cold, eyes were burning a bit, slight sore throat, but what really stood out was for 3 or 4 days I often felt out of breath. Normally I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it but who knows.

Seems measures are working in California, let's hope it continues: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

We had a “high floor” for our response

Evidently the US was the global pandemic version of Baldoquin: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/ Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”

I thought it was suspected early on that Pangolin or "Scaly Anteater" was the probably source at the Wuhan market. Evidently its meat is considered a delicacy, its scales have therapeutic properties, and it is the most heavily trafficked mammal in the world! Can't believe this thing exists.

What about China? Italy? Spain, France? Germany now has now forbids groups of more than 2. England has also upped their restrictions. There are no common political threads across all these countries, unless you believe in an X-Files conspiracy. The whole world is heading toward lockdown.

Looks like the fatality rate was quite low (0.03%): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8406723.stm