Up to full isolation here at the world headquarters.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• Original research! – I was interested how quickly mitigating measures work, so I made a timeline showing deaths, daily percentage increase in deaths, and mitigation measures across five European countries, the US, South Korea, and China. It also has a chart of deaths vs. tests in the US, to compare growth between the two numbers.
• Masks work – Tomorrow or over the weekend, I’m going to turn some things (dish towels, cotton t-shirts) into homemade masks and report on the process.
• Masks work: Czechia edition – A massive popular effort in the Czech Republic yielded near-100% mask-wearing with almost no central direction, and seems to have helped dramatically in arresting the spread of the coronavirus.
• Chinese scientists forced to destroy COVID-19 samples in December – ‘A regional health official in Wuhan […] demanded the destruction of the lab samples […]’ Sure. A regional health official, not acting under central direction. Totally believable.
• Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a treatment protocol? – Hydroxychloroquine, an analogue of regular chloroquine, is an old anti-malarial drug¹.
• Aggressively serious anti-coronavirus propaganda banners in China – “Everyone you encounter on the streets now is a wild ghost seeking to take your life.”
• Clinical predictors of mortality due to COVID-19 – Age, pre-existing conditions (which include things like hypertension and asthma, so it’s not just the seriously sick who are dying).
• How many asymptomatic coronavirus cases are there? – About 20% of the total, based on experience from the Diamond Princess outbreak.
• A social distancing scoreboard for the US, down to the county level – To my surprise, Pennsylvania’s actually doing pretty well, along with much of the US that’s actually imposed lockdowns. Also of note: who are these people, and where do they get their location data? (Tracking libraries for phone apps, almost certainly.)

Defense

• What’s this panoramic windowed room for on American aircraft carriers? – My first guess, ‘admiral’s dining room’, was not correct.
• Big Army, Navy conduct first test of hypersonic weapon – Zoom zoom.
• Big Army M4 modernization continues – Turning more M4s into M4A1s, for one, but also doing some other stuff.
• Marines to ditch tanks – Parvusimperator is not a fan. Discord regular Kilo Sierra sees the merit. Stop by the Discord and spit in the face of death by talking about tanks instead of some dumb virus.
• As expected, Bell’s V280 and Sikorsky-Boeing’s SB-1 get the nod for prototype evaluation in the Black Hawk replacement program – Neither one is much of a helicopter in the classic sense.
• BAAINBw publishes tender for SSchtzWakRw G26 – That’s the German federal office for Bundeswehr procurement, and the Scharfschützenwaffe kurze Reichweite. G26.

Self-Defense (also Guns)

• Realistic de-escalation; or, how to talk people down from high-tension situations
• American Holoptics buys EOTech
• Indian Army breaks tradition, makes a sensible small arms procurement choice – 16,000 IWI Negevs, coming soon to an Indian unit near you.
• Boom operator photo: four B-1Bs in formation with his tanker
• Oh, the era of 25mm AT guns – A bygone era, to be sure.

Grab Bag

• Pablo Escobar’s hippos are filling a vacancy in the Colombian ecosystem – Two vacancies, actually. They’re similar in diet and size to extinct giant llamas, and similar in size and habitat to extinct (checks notes) notoungulates.