"I like a good story, well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself." - Mark Twain
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Dear 70 IQ Meatpuppets: Your Ride Is Here
In any emergency involving more than zero persons, the driving force determining the duration and severity of the emergency will quickly become the IQ and common sense of the stupidest person(s) in the group. Also their level of preparedness, and the global group wisdom of whatever entity or agency may have been responsible for preparing them (or failing miserably to do so) to cope with such emergency.
This is why the castaways have spent three seasons in prime time and 45 years in syndication, on Gilligan's Island.
It's why Thomas Duncan got to the United States.
It's why Madrid currently has an ongoing Ebola problem.
And today, it's why Officer Safety, in Dallas, is at risk to be the next Texan to die a horrible and totally preventable death inside about two weeks, unless he's very, very fortunate.
(And true to form, Dallas health official fucktards continue to do what fucktards do best, insisting that the deputy can't have Ebola because he wasn't exposed to the guy who wasn't there, ignoring that the entire apartment he was in unprotected was so contaminated that it had to be decontaminated days later. Notice they didn't say "He can't have Ebola because we've tested him, and the tests are completely negative for 3 weeks". Nor that "We think the risk is low, but he was definitely exposed to the contagion, so we'll monitor him for 21 days, and hope for the best." But that because they say so, this can't be Ebola, because "smarter than basic principles of epidemiology". You can't make stuff up that's as surreal as the daily behavior of people in charge in Dallas. I have to ask: do y'all just elect people there with the lowest IQs, or is it just a lucky serendipity that that's who you have in apparently every position of importance on this case?)
If he is infected, it's also why he probably won't be the last one there to be so.
On a human level, if this turns out poorly, I'm sorry for him and his family, and I'm sure he's a nice guy and great fun at parties.
Unfortunately, Ebola didn't get that memo, and it can't read.
Ebola will not "Respect Your Authoritay!" just because you have a badge.
Ebola will not stop because you're cute, or have a banging body or a killer smile.
Ebola will not stop because you like puppies and kittens.
Ebola will not stop because of any countless number of asinine reasons you, whoever you are, think it should magically want to go and jack somebody else up, if you're one of the troglodyte halfwit continuation school mouthbreathing utterly clueless morons.
THIS
stops Ebola.
Got PPE on? EVERY TIME? BEFORE you risk exposure??
NO?!?
No problem.
You'll get Ebola instead. And then, in +/- 12 days, you'll die in a puddle of your own bloody guts as you vomit and shit them out both ends, because you were ignorant, stupid, uninformed, lied to, gullible, lazy, careless, clueless, depravedly indifferent, and just generally a waste of skin and oxygen on the cosmic balance sheet of the Universe.
And Mother Nature has red-carded you out of the game, and out of the gene pool, forevermore.
The Universe doesn't give a damn about that, and for the most part neither do I, since I don't know you.
But you're going to take out people all around you, and eventually, you'll get to someone I do care about, and for that bout of serial killing, there isn't a circle of Hell low enough to give you what you deserve for what you're wreaking upon the rest of the population every time you come up to bat.
So to the jackasses at the State Department and the White House who think, despite your rosy good wishes, that checking asymptomatic people is helping, and that transporting bushels of potentially infectious people here 24/7 is a good idea;
to the clueless bastards in Dallas who pressure-washed infectious hazmat Ebola vomit into an entire community,
who put an entire family in a plague house for six days,
who sent a paramedic team and ambulance back onto the streets for 48 hours after transporting a known Ebola patient with no decon,
thus exposing further patients on subsequent ambulance trips for two more days,
who sent a three man sheriff's team unprotected into that same plague house,
which team was stupid enough to walk in the door despite such silly-ass criminally negligent orders,
whose "judges" wandered in and sat with the exposed family in the contaminated quarters in their street clothes, then wore the same infected garments back to the office, and home to their family, after a nice snuggly meet-and-greet with hordes of similarly clueless reporters;
to the incredibly brain-deprived shit-for-brains Infection Control "specialists" at hundreds to thousands of hospitals who think they can handle Ebola with "Standard precautions", and keep peddling that utter bullshit to staffs who have to weigh your jackassery against the need for a paycheck to feed and shelter their families;
to the idiots in Spain who showed all the competence of the Dallas authorities;
and to the hundreds of thoroughly heads-up-your-asses-because-the-sun-shines-out-of-Obama's-bellybutton reporters, news hairdos, and editor/producers;
stop driving the Ebola Retard Bus, because you're KILLING US, Smalls.
No, not figuratively, LITERALLY, you flaming dumbshits.
And I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if this thing gets unleashed and goes hog-wild, and gets to the populace at large, before we go, we'll hunt you all down, and set you on fire, to watch you dance and listen to your final screams, just to make us feel a little bit better in our last days on earth.
And that's the only thing you can look forward to in this entire outbreak that's going to make me smile.
Bummer for you though.
One other thing, illustrative of the point:
The new phone books are out.
The new numbers:
8,033 total cases, 3,865 dead, as of Oct. 5th. Spain has been added to the tally board, but they haven't yet updated it with their case, nor Duncan's death, nor the new Dallas case. But they will.
Sierra Leone's death toll has surged upward with their recent come-to-Jesus revelations, adding more deaths in the last 4 days than the total they've recorded in the entire previous seven weeks.
Given their laxity and mendacious prior casualty and infection reporting, it's prudent to assume they have unreported (hence un-contact-traced) cases numbering into the thousands. Nothing less would support so many new dead, so rapidly.
They had more deaths over the same period than Liberia, which has nearly double the reported cases of Sierra Leone.
Why? Reflect on the fact that this is also the period exactly 10-15 days after their vaunted "nationwide 3-day quarantine" in late September, keeping everyone locked up inside their homes uninfected alongside the infected.
Then flash forward to the fact that we did the exact same sort of quarantine in Dallas for six days, from Sept. 28th to Oct. 4th, with the other members of the Duncan family, locking the uninfected inside known contagious facilities.
Brilliant!
So the Dallas city government is demonstrably twice as smart as the government of Sierra Leone.
Walk tall, Texas.
Hopefully, Dallas hardware stores will soon experience a run on pitchforks and scythes, and residents will stage a torchlight visit to some local leading citizens. Or at least take some hot tar and chicken feathers, and a rail.
Fucking brilliant rant my friend. Society is in dire trouble.
ReplyDeleteAesop,
ReplyDeletecouple of technical questions, if you would be so kind...
What is the infection rate if you are exposed? We hear about the death rate, but I'm not clear on if you can be exposed and not get this.
Related, how is R(o)[R nought] determined? Apparently we are not as worried about ebola because it has R(2). But, how determined? If it is based on historical numbers, from isolated rural africa, how do those numbers compare to what we are seeing in a mobile and urban population? IE is the reported R(2) LOWER than it should be?
If it's lower than it should be, what is the more likely REAL R(2) assuming infection and mortality rates are much higher than reported?
Or is it based on some sort of model? In which case, what happens to the model when realistic numbers are used instead of the underreported ones?
Thanks again for you work with this.
Nick
First question: We have no way to tell you that. You're asking me how many people get something that we would never knowingly expose them to, and extrapolate their chances of catching it.
ReplyDeleteWe can test that with other diseases, but for deadly incurable diseases, not so much.
What we do know from animal testing is that a very small number of actual viruses (<10) is sufficient to guarantee the full development of symptoms. In other words, getting exposed to even a little bit is a slam-dunk for getting Ebola. This obviously argues for staying the hell away from it no matter what. Look at the routine precautions even in the hellhole that is W. Africa. When you can get largely illiterate populations to grasp that complacency kills, and follow a protection regimen that puts getting dressed for a mere spaceflight to shame, this is some serious stuff. Duncan got it from a prolonged taxi journey with a friend, trying to find an open hospital bed.
For the R(nought) I defer to epidemiology experts, which I'm not. As I have time, I'll dig into that, but you'll understand I'm not going to do a semester of med school to answer a post. And I don't want to get shelled by the real scientists out there who do that for a living when I get it wrong. I'm a practitioner at the pointy end of the stick, with a decent complement of brain cells, a grasp of the obvious, and a pretty comprehensive intolerance for fools and BS.
But if I have it right, an R of 2 gets you the exact exponential climb we see right now.
So the fact that it doubles every 14-21 days instead of triples or quadruples is a cold comfort.
The likelihood is that if the numbers were being counted with notional Swiss watch precision, we'd see that the R-number may be higher than 2.
As I've previously noted, a disease like this, that's currently doubling the number of infected persons about every 21 days, from Ebola's current numbers, outstrips the population of the planet by the middle of next summer, if nothing else changes. (Even that's iffy, since it's taking closer to 30 days in Guinea, but only 14 in Liberia, and all of those numbers are really crap for accuracy.)
If Ebola doubles for real everywhere in 14 days, things are pretty dire.
It takes 30 doubles to go from 1 to 1B. 33 of them gets you to 8 billion. 8 billion is more people than we have on the earth. 33 x 2 weeks is 66 weeks. 99 weeks for 3 week intervals.
And we're already 14 doubles into that process, right now, working on number 15. That leaves us 18 to go before we hit the "Game Over" point.
And the real numbers may put us one more jump beyond where we think we are.
(Imagine being in a plane flying through mountains in the fog, at night, with no radar, a dead reckoning plot, and an altimeter that was "accurate" +/- 5000'.)
That's Ebola, right now.
And TPTB are dumbshitting around about this like we can spare the time, or fix it later on.
Thanks Aesop,
ReplyDeleteThat was the kind of answer I was hoping for.
Maybe someone else with info and knowledge of the field will chime in if they see the question.
I definitely understand your desire to not get buried under a ton of "iExperts" arguing pedantic details while they should be out taking care of business.
Please keep sharing your observations and info...
nick
Point of order.
ReplyDeleteThe dipshit `judge` that went into the apartment unsheathed is not a judge. It is a title given to the highest elected official in a texas county.
And yes he has the IQ of a tapeworm.
I’ve read real numbers for infection rates and deaths in Africa are 3 to 4 times what has been reported, but that doesn’t mean they would do the same here.........right.
ReplyDeleteRd
Wake up people, This shit Will Kill You. Yes, You. And your family. Be careful, take precautions. Good Luck.
ReplyDeleteLike you said, if I catch that shit, there's a lotta scum that's gonna get lit up! You think Rambo was a one-man army? You ain't seen nothin' yet!
ReplyDeleteI am not an epidemiologist, but I am a forecaster, primarily of technology. Forecasting the spread of Ebola as an exponential is not correct. As the number infected grows, the number of remaining uninfected shrinks, and the opportunities fo the disease to spread likewise shrink. If I had the numbers and were trying to forecast it, I'd try a Logistic as the first model, refining that as I got better numbers. This doesn't mean it won't eventually kill everyone, but it does mean it will take longer than a true exponential growth would.
ReplyDelete@joseph
ReplyDeleteI'm not an epidemiologist either, so I'm sure you're right.
At some point, the curve will flatten out.
The problem is that by the time that happens, it's long past the pandemic stage anyways, so WGAF?
When tens of thousands, millions, or billions of people have it or are already dead from it, the fact that it's taking longer to double, or missing a pocket here or there and spreading inefficiently is going to be precious little comfort.