Pet Blogging

Be sure to turn the sound up…

Here's a wombat in a washing machine to make you smile…wait for it. #sleepyburrows pic.twitter.com/H6MlGFhRV1

— 10 daily (@10Daily) March 20, 2020

… who among us has not said ‘Excuse me’ to a furry housemate who’s chosen a napping burrow very poorly?

For the anime/manga fans among us:

A Tokyo ryokan suffering from #coronavirus-related cancellations is offering the Literary Giant Experience: you get locked in & until your stay is over, staff pretending to be editors (they will dress up for extra) regularly call to check on your progresshttps://t.co/tMocR2afGY

— Dan Orlowitz (@aishiterutokyo) March 15, 2020

(Since light novels — an evolution of last century’s pulps — are apparently quite popular in Japan, there is a standing trope about the hapless ‘author’ hiding out from their relentless editors, forever demanding moar content. Old-fashioned, usually secluded ryokan inns are obviously a good — or at least a graphically attractive — place to hide out. For a fee, they’d probably agree to adress you as ‘George R.R. Martin’… )

Jagoff employer of the day:

GameStop has instructed employees to tell law enforcement trying to shut down their stores that they're "essential retail." They've been handed a flyer they're supposed to give police with a number for GameStop's corporate office. https://t.co/PVvBXTymcf

— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) March 19, 2020

Good news:

NEW: I dug into the concerns that ibuprofen makes coronavirus symptoms worse. In short, they're unfounded.

And no, despite what you may have read this week, the World Health Organization is NOT warning people against taking ibuprofen.https://t.co/XJmuEed9J5

— Stephanie M. Lee (@stephaniemlee) March 19, 2020

And due respect for a pioneer (h/t commentor Peter D):

Sharon Sanders’s blog appears to have been the first Western source to note the virus that would soon explode into a worldwide pandemic, @farhip reports. https://t.co/kr1qLxqNtM

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) March 14, 2020

… When Chinese officials admit to a problem, she said, they tend to undersell it — a red flag that there’s far more to the story. This is what prompted her to stay up late on the night of Dec. 31. But Sanders said she had no idea where the story of the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan would lead.

Her blog’s contributors — who include some medical professionals, though many merely “self-trained” disease-detection enthusiasts — routinely submit links to local news reports, medical journals and other data from around the world, with an eye toward unusual patterns. One of the tipoffs to the seriousness of the Wuhan situation was the absence of data: After the initial disclosures from officials on Dec. 31, the statements stopped.

“China always reports their good news,” she said. “When you don’t hear anything for five days, it warrants more investigation. . . . We knew something was unusual because we follow China and look for trends.”

The details pointed to a far more serious situation than Chinese officials had described. Sanders and her contributors soon started picking up “things we had never seen before” from a hodgepodge of sources, including doctors in Hong Kong, local media accounts and ordinary people in Wuhan. The bits and pieces were shocking: hospital wards with health-care workers dressed in full patient-protective suits, teams disinfecting entire streets, body bags stacked in vehicles outside hospitals.

It quickly became clear that the problem wasn’t isolated or contained. “It appeared to be an infectious and dangerous agent, [an] ominous sign for the world,” she said.

Sanders, herself a self-trained disease-tracker after working in finance and real estate, co-founded the site in 2006 as a hobby — or, as she describes it, “a fun way to meet interesting and intelligent people online.”…

Sanders doesn’t take advertising or sell anything on her site. She funds the whole enterprise out of her pocket; her overhead is just a few thousand dollars a year for server time. The rest, she says, is “a labor of love.”

These days, more than a few people seem interested. Since the outbreak in Wuhan, Sanders says, FluTrackers has attracted nearly 353,000 unique visitors who have clicked on the site 15.5 million times, far more than the 11.6 million recorded during all of 2019.

Friday Morning Open Thread: TGI(Can You Tell?)FridayPost + Comments (158)