Full isolation continues. Food and ammunition stocks holding out well.
No April Fool’s jokes here. We’re all business.
Wuhan Coronavirus: Maps and Data
- Coronavirus resource use projections, state by state – I can’t vouch for their methodology one way or the other.
- A new champion (in the field of US coronavirus maps) rises – This one has county-level data, but also more charts than Johns Hopkins’ effort and a link to the massive CSV containing all their data.
Wuhan Coronavirus: Other
- Spain bought a bunch of coronavirus tests from Shenzhen – They don’t work.
- How Texas grocery chain H-E-B managed the coronavirus prepper demand spike – They’ve been prepping for a pandemic since 2005.
- Iceland’s mass testing shows a 50% asymptomatic positive rate – Confounding factors: they might have found people infected but pre-symptomatic; false positives could drive the rate up.
- de Blasio’s worse week as mayor couldn’t have come at a worse time – It’s even a New York outlet saying so.
- Estimates suggest Wuhan death rates are much higher than officially reported – Tyrannical bureaucratic state undercounts things that make it look bad? Shock!
- [Abbott (the health care equipment manufacturer) has a coronavirus test coming soon](https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/product-and-innovation/detect-covid-19-in-as-little-as-5-minutes.html0 – Also, the ‘lab’ it runs in is a toaster-sized box that looks like it was designed by an Apple alum. Abbott expects to have five million tests produced in April, which would more than double the current test-per-day capacity in the US if they can all be processed.
- A guy on Twitter reads a biochemistry paper so I don’t have to figure it out for you – It proposes a mode of action for the coronavirus, by computational analysis: the virus makes proteins which kick iron out of hemoglobin, reducing oxygen delivered by the blood. Lung issues are a result of lack of O2 in the blood, not its cause. Chloroquine binds to the hemoglobin-busting proteins, hence its effectiveness. In the Discord, boomerang-pigeon provides some additional context.
- On the heels of British sources saying China may be downplaying their COVID epidemic by a factor of 40, US sources say that yes, China was definitely lying – I did some amateur analysis and thought to myself, “A factor of 15 sounds like a lot. I’d better propose it as a worst case.” Au contraire! A factor of 15 means they’re up to ~50,000 deaths. A factor of 40 says ~132,000. This on the heels of uncritical reporting from a number of American outlets calling the US outbreak the worst in the world.
Defense
- The BBC Presents: a Naval Mystery – One they solved, rather than one you can attempt to solve yourself.
- Germany to split its Tornado replacements between Eurofighters, Super Hornets – A NATO agreement requires that Germany operate aircraft that can drop American nuclear gravity bombs. Hornets are an easier platform to make meet that requirement than Typhoons.
- US Marine Corps force design 2030 – Parvusimperator doesn’t like it. Ask him why.
- Why ditch tanks? They’re not survivable enough on the modern battlefield – Or rather, they’re on the poor end of the spectrum in what the article calls the hider-finder conflict.
- The SR-71 almost came back for spying on terrorists – Missed opportunities.
- Oshkosh gets the nod to rebuild HEMTTs and PLS trucks – They’ve done it in the past, they’ll do it again.
- KC-46 suffers from ‘excessive fuel leaks’ – Excessive is not defined in the article, beyond Boeing’s statement that maintainers are finding fuel between the primary and secondary fuel leakage barriers.
- Grumman’s latest spy drone is called the Great Horned Owl – As always, The Drive does great work.
History
- Photo: the US Navy, in 1927, anchors in Guantanamo Bay
- Old story of the week: listen to the guns fall silent on the Western Front, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, on the centennial thereof – I listened to it and thought to myself, “Wait! Those sound like crappy TV, movie, and video game sound effects!” Of course, those are the sound effects for ‘large-bore artillery’ because they were, in many cases, recorded off of WW1 field pieces.
The Final Frontier (it’s Space)
- SpaceX publishes the first version of the Starship user’s guide – Want to put a huge payload in orbit? Start here!
- Space internet company OneWeb goes bankrupt – I saw it observed that someone’s going to get a sweet deal on a bunch of orbital hardware, and that railroad companies in the 1800s oftentimes grew in similar ways. First, you go bankrupt. Then, someone buys your assets at a deep discount, finishes the last bit of the work you couldn’t, and turns out to be massively profitable.
Grab Bag
- The crude oil market is broken – Worldwide oil demand is down by 25%. Wyoming Asphalt Sour, was bid at -$0.19—they’ll pay you to take it. Also, apparently, there are only about 700 oil refineries worldwide1.
- Unrelated, but I found out this last week that there are 700,000 active ham radio licenses in the US. I would have never guessed that community is some 20 times larger than the USPSA community. ↩
On the potential-mode-of-action thread, this twitterer seems to disagree that it’s plausible.
The most compelling critique is that a mature red blood cell is just a bag of hemoglobin (there’s no cellular machinery for the virus to use), red blood cells don’t have the receptor the virus seems to bind to, and there’s not a plausible mechanism for the proteins in question to get inside a red blood cell absent attacking them directly.