“All the feels,” said the New Jersey nurse who snapped this photograph. “I love my job!” Read the rest

British inventor James Dyson announced that his company has spent the last week designing a new ventilator for COVID-19 patients and will ship 10,000 of them early next month to support the UK's National Health Service. He's also donating 5,000 more of them to international initiatives. From CNN:

Dyson said the company had designed and built an entirely new ventilator, called the "CoVent," since he received a call 10 days ago from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.,P"This new device can be manufactured quickly, efficiently and at volume," Dyson added, saying that the new ventilator has been designed to "address the specific needs" of coronavirus patients....

"The core challenge was how to design and deliver a new, sophisticated medical product in volume and in an extremely short space of time," he added. "The race is now on to get it into production."

• Three manufacturing plants of Ipca Laboratories get exemption • Agency had cited ‘systematic data manipulation’ at one plant Read the rest

The complete abandonment of any leadership whatsoever. That's what we are witnessing in Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic that is now killing Americans at an exponentially increasing rate.

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Donald Trump told state governors on an emergency pandemic conference call.

Yes. He said that.

From the NYT's live coverage:

President Trump told a group of governors Monday morning that they should not wait for the federal government to fill the growing demand for respirators needed to help people diagnosed with coronavirus.

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times.

“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”

The suggestion surprised some of the governors, who have been scrambling to contain the outbreak and are increasingly looking to the federal government for help with equipment, personnel and financial aid.

Mr. Trump used much of the call to repeat the same upbeat rhetoric he has offered in public, assuring the governors: “We’re going to get it remedied and hopefully very quickly.”

I mean, wow.

Wow. Read the rest

Supposedly driven by the virus crisis, On-nomi (オン飲み, "Drinking on[line]") is the practice of getting together with friends on the internet and having a drink together. It's the touchless, pathogen-free gathering of the immediate future.

As machine-translated from Asahi:

7:00 pm, Friday in early March. Eight people gathered in front of a PC or smartphone at home or in a shared working space raised corona beer bottles at each screen. It is said that it was triggered by the planning of on-drinking due to the spread of the new infection ... women in their forties living in and around Zushi City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Ayumi Nonaka (42), a web creator who has settled down on raising children, has held regular drinking parties and other events with women of the same generation in the area to deepen exchanges. Ayumi-san made a homepage such as "Remote work and haven't gone out of the house for about 3 weeks" "I'm fat because I didn't go out of school because I didn't go out of school" "Then, let's talk about Corona's worries online." Using "Zoom", which is used in corporate online meetings, it was spread out on SNS and other places to make it a place where anyone can participate.

The reliability of the Zoom teleconferencing app is making it suddenly ubiquitous in the news. Read the rest

The death toll in Italy's coronavirus outbreak today passed 1,000.

Schools throughout Italy are completely shut down, which is reportedly driving a surge in internet traffic as bored kids forced to stay indoors turn to online games. Read the rest

📷 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s communications secretary, Fabio Wajngarten [RIGHT] instagrammed this selfie of himself hanging out with Trump and Pence before he tested positive for coronavirus.

Bolsonaro's press secretary hung out with Trump and Pence on Saturday and today tested positive for coronavirus.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both met this week with a government official from Brazil who has since tested positive for coronavirus. Read the rest

With unfortunate frequency, elderly patients go to the hospital for a surgery or other treatment and quickly become confused, bewildered, and sometimes agitated or totally disoriented. This is called delirium and while it apparently affects between 10 and 50 percent of patients over 65, it's only recently been studied in depth. Sharon K. Inouye, director of Harvard's Aging Brain Center, is leading the charge to understand delirium, its impact on patients' longterm cognitive faculties, and how to prevent it. From Scientific American:

[Delirium] is the phenomenon, sadly familiar to many families, of Grandpa never being quite the same after an operation...

The consequences of delirium, if it lasts more than a few days and especially if it is followed by cognitive decline, are enormous. “It’s a house of cards,” Inouye says. “Patients start getting treated with medications for agitation or disruptive behavior, and those medications lead to complications. Or they are very sedated, and that leads to complications.” Delirious patients may choke on their food or pills and die of aspiration pneumonia. They may wind up in bed for long periods and suffer fatal blood clots. Once up, they are prone to falling. It’s a downward spiral and a costly one. Delirium adds more than $183 billion a year to U.S. health care costs, outstripping congestive heart failure.

Fortunately, basic steps can be taken to prevent delirium or shorten its course, such as making sure the patient is well hydrated, has access to eyeglasses and hearing aids if he or she uses them, gets out of bed and walks as soon as possible, has adequate sleep, and is socially engaged by hospital staff and loved ones.

"Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death"-@DrTedros

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Read the rest

Not for much longer, sure, but here's a map of American counties whose residents enjoy a life expectancy of more than eighty years. It was drafted by Spooderman89 on Reddit using mapchart.com.

I believe the only states with not a single long-lived county are Mississippi and Delaware. Read the rest

New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Saturday declared a state of emergency in over the coronavirus epidemic, and confirms 76 cases of coronavirus in the state Read the rest

'Smallpox comes to Deadwood', a clip from the swearily beloved television series DEADWOOD, via Reddit, as pointed out by Helen Kennedy.

An instructive video for our times.

[YOUTUBE] Read the rest

He's just so stupid. Read the rest

Impeached and manifestly corrupt U.S. president President Donald John Trump on Friday signed the $8.3-billion Coronavirus response funding bill before leaving the White House for golf or whatever. Read the rest

The number of people around the world who are infected with the new coronavirus is close to 100,000 as of Friday, according to global health officials.

In the United States, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is now 226 in 19 states, including 12 deaths. Read the rest