Who Had The Vente Herpes?

 h/t Miguel

No, really.

"Re-useable coffee cups! That's brilliant, Wilson!

What could possibly go wrong?"

"Um, the Legal Department is calling to speak with 'The World-Class Prize-Winning Idiot Who Came Up With That Jackassical Idea To Get Us Sued For Transmitting Every Communicable Disease Known To Man Including Hepatitis And AIDS', on line 2 sir; and I have 378 county Health Boards holding on the main PBX. Do you want them geographically, alphabetically, or in order of rage?"

Look, I get that restaurants washing out coffee mugs isn't a new thing, but that's actual restaurants. With adult supervision. Expecting minimum-wage twenty-something barristas who can barely get a coffee order right any 3 times out of 10 to run dishwashers is the point where this whole thing jumped the shark.

If they were anything close to smart, they'd just say "Bring your own mug", they'd dump a pre-measured amount of burnt coffee into it, and call it even. But they won't do that, because they don't trust their own idiots not to drop and break the mug. But you're supposed to trust them to clean and sanitize them.

Riiiiiight.

Aesop 2, Squids 0. Navy Leadership Is An Oxymoron.

Cold Comfort indeed.

Not far back, there was considerable press announcing the two Navy hospital ships, USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort, would be deployed to Los Angeles and New York respectively, to treat non-COVID-19 patients.

We were happy that they'd thought of the gesture to reassure the populace, but noted at the time that keeping the current plague off of any such ship was about as likely as running a submarine with a screen door, but apparently the GT (general technical intelligence, and predictive of IQ) score to become a Navy admiral has been set so low since the Obozo administration that the program that selects USN admirals should be renamed Mabus' 600.

As we noted on Cdr Salamander's blog , not once, but twice, once referencing converting idled Carnival cruise ships into hospital ships, and again regarding exactly the Mercy and Comfort, regarding the ships becoming infected plague ships amidst this (or any) pandemic, such eventuality was both predictable and indeed, inevitable:

"Ookaaaaaaay, let's say I buy this, for maybe 1 minute.
1) How do you keep people with COVID-19 out of the pool?
Not just patients, but the crew, and those who make deliveries of food, medicine, other supplies?
I'll wait over here while you work that one out. 

{And I'll play fair.
Currently, quarantine would require at least 14 days' wait.
Ignoring the CDC test-kit clusterfluffle, test kits now take 1-3 days turnaround. Still too long for someone
writhing in pain to wait pierside for permission to bring Kung Flu onto the ship.
When the promised 15-minute point-of-care COVID-19 test kits exist in reality, and you have half a million of them handy at pierside by the gangway,
you maybe could get over that hump. Until then, it's a total deal-breaker. Period.} 

2) Once you fail at #1, then what?
You've now re-created the exact SitRep from the MV Death Princess.
So...how'd that one work out for Carnival? 

3) How did those highly skilled crew members on the MV Death Princess do at keeping quarantine among the passengers?
Knowing that level of expertise, how're they going to do at keeping COVID-19 off the next ship, and the next...?

 So, how did our know-it-all alarmism and fear-mongering do, in reality?

(Nailed it.) Multiple patients infected with coronavirus were transferred to the hospital ship Comfort from the Javits Center in New York by mistake, three U.S. officials tell Fox News.

The number of Covid-19 patients brought on board the hospital ship was estimated to be “less than five,” one official said. The information had not been previously reported.  The patients were transferred sometime Friday, according to the officials. At the time that the patients were transferred to the hospital ship, the initial screening did not indicate they were positive, officials said.

So much for Comfort.
What about Mercy?

(Nailed it again.) Seven sailors aboard the USNS Mercy, a Navy hospital ship sent to the Port of Los Angeles to support Los Angeles-area hospitals, have tested positive for the coronavirus as of Tuesday afternoon, April 14.Another 113 sailors have also been moved off the ship and are self-isolating because they were in contact with the virus-infected sailors. The Mercy has a medical crew of more than 1,000 personnel and a civilian crew of about 80 that runs the ship’s systems.
“All are currently in quarantine off the ship and have tested negative for COVID-19 with the exception of one crew member, who was the fifth confirmed positive case,” Lt. Andrew Bertucci, a spokesman aboard the Mercy, said. “Crew members who were in contact with the COVID-19 positive individuals are in self-quarantine where they will self-monitor for COVID-like symptoms.” The first sailor to test positive was reported on April 8: three more were confirmed positive by Friday, April 10; and four new cases of infection were added over the weekend. 

We are not an exalted Navy admiral. We are not even a Navy commander. The highest position we occupied in the sea service was to be the night watch supervisor of laundry for the ship's embarked company on LHA-4 Nassau for a happily brief imprisonment cruise of a Marine BLT from Norfolk VA to rattle the nation's saber at Nicaragua (it worked), and thence to return and attack Onslow Beach NC for a blessed release from seagoing durance vile.

But we were bright enough to know before this current boondoggle began, that sending active service ships into a plague was asinine beyond belief, when no one running Big Blue could figure that out, nor find their own asses, with both hands, a map, compass, sextant, and a rear view mirror.

We do not practice gypsy fortunetelling. We are not clairvoyant. But we were clearly brighter on this wee point than the acting SecNav and CNO, in about five seconds, because we practice common sense rather ruthlessly, and haven't got our head shoved so far up our own ass we could inspect our tonsils.

Would that anyone running anything in the Navy could make the same claim.
There may be some officers in the USN from O-6 or up that aren't actual idiots. But at this point, we'd probably be better off firing the lot, wholesale, and trying again from scratch, than risking another ship or another crew to the forlorn hope that such is the case.

We've always liked the Navy (if only for amphibious shipping and naval gunfire), and tend to think that having a highly functional one that executes both traitors and its duties diligently, competently, and intelligently, ought to be a rather high national priority. Apparently that view is not shared in Washington D.C. We humbly beseech the supervisory PTB at DoD and the White House to kindly unf**k themselves, and start appointing people to supervise and command the weak sister service with something approaching the ability one might reasonably expect from some Sunday puddle pilot in sole command of a Nordic 26 through Puget Sound any weekend.

If only for the novelty of that approach, based purely on evidence from our own lying eyes for the last 10 years. Ideally, before some enemy hands us another Pearl Harbor. We probably aren't going to get a two year grace period to rebuild the service the next time that happens, so we'd be far better off weeding out all the morons - in their thousands, apparently, from the top down - before that happens.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...



Go to the linked pdf to see this readable. Warning: May induce nausea.

Oh, the whole COVID-19 Kung Flu thing keeps on getting better.
CDC COVID-19 Quarantine Algorithm

Per CDC, unless the person of interest is actually direct from Hubei, China, or a healthcare worker exposed to someone proven by laboratory test to have COVID-19, the risk is assumed to be moderate to nothing.

A person from here, and who was infected by someone else here, who could have full-blown Kung Flu any day now, is dictated by this asinine algorithm to present NO INDENTIFIABLE RISK(!!). "The Great and Powerful Oz Has Spoken!"

No, really.

This happy horseshit from the same @$$clowns who told you in 2014
"Ebola will never get here"
"If it gets here, we can handle it"
"Any hospital with isolation can do this".

When you keep asking retards the same questions, it's a mark of insanity to expect different results.
And when you're banging your head against the wall, it feels so good to stop.
As I told you in the Gilligan Effect comments, the solution to the castaways' ongoing problem is simply to kill Gilligan in S1E1.

The CDC is apparently populated entirely by Gilligans.



Kabuki Psuedosecurity Theater.
You have to admire the chutzpah of people doing spot checks for
fever for a disease that sometimes doesn't present with fever, and
has a 2-14 DAY latent incubation stage. Almost like they were
deliberately TRYING to spread the infection worldwide within
 a couple of months.

See how long before this inescapable problem bears permanent, ongoing fruit.

(80/20 CDC stands for "C**ks**kers Dumber than Clowns".)