Unbelievable:
The owner of a North Carolina short track is opening his track’s gates to fans on Saturday. But “corona-infested” media members are barred from attending unless they buy a ticket like a regular fan.
311 Speedway in Stokes County is allowing fans in defiance of an executive order by Gov. Roy Cooper barring large events with more than 25 people. That’s a limit 100 times fewer than the 2,500 capacity of the track’s grandstands, but track owner Mike Fulp is going ahead with his plans to let people watch races in-person on Saturday night.
He does not want media members covering those races, however. Fulp posted to Facebook that the “corona-infested media” was not allowed to be at the track unless they bought a ticket. Why? Because “we don’t have people here with the corona.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/north-caro...ont-allow-coronainfested-media-224138647.html
jmdirt said:
This came up on Flipboard this morning, I don't know anything about Elemental , but this is interesting:
https://elemental.medium.com/corona...isease-which-explains-everything-2c4032481ab2
Maybe one of the people more in the know can evaluate this for us?
Yes, there's a lot of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can attack the circulatory system, including the heart as well as blood vessels. The fact that it can use furin is also extremely significant, and one of the major ways it's distinguished from (and potentially more deadly than) the original SARS.
That said, i don't think vascular effects explain everything. People seem to die from the virus in a variety of ways, but a lot of deaths occur from respiratory failure. Vascular effects can contribute to that, but so do the effects directly on the lungs.
More on population density. When I made a scatter plot of density vs. case rate, there were six states that were outliers, that seemed to form their own line at a higher rate of cases per population density than the rest. Four of these states—NY, IL, NE and SD—feature one city that contains more than 20% of the state’s entire population. That’s fairly uncommon. AFAIK, there are only three other states like this: Vermont (Burlington), Arizona (Phoenix) and Alaska (Anhcorage, which at 40% of the states’s population, ties NYC.) I’m only considering incorporated cities here, not metropolitan areas.
When I removed these seven states from the others, the correlation between population density and case rate now jumped to 0.87. This tells us that more homogeneously populated states have a more uniform case rate. But even more, it suggests that there is a power law relationship between density and case rate. Let me explain.
Most spread of the virus is thought to result from coughing, breathing or otherwise discharging into the air viral particles by infected people. When this happens, a three-dimensional cloud forms. Like all three-dimensional objects or distributions, its volume is related to a linear dimension, like radius in the case of a sphere, by a cube function. So as the viral cloud expands and spreads into the air, the concentration of virus in it should fall steeply with distance from the infected person.
In other words, as you approach an infected person, your risk of becoming infected does not increase linearly, but by a power function. This suggests to me that population density might be related to infection rate by a power law, and that’s generally consistent with the finding that states with a highly densely populated city tend to have higher case rates. Suppose there are two states with equal land areas and populations, but one has a completely homogeneous population, while the other has 50% of its population concentrated in a relatively small city. Outside that city, the second state will have half the population density of the first state, and somewhat less than half the rate of cases. But inside the city, the case rate will jump dramatically, because the density is far more than twice the density throughout the other state (e.g., the population density in Manhattan is more than 200 times the density of NY state overall). This will more than outweigh the lower case rate outside. This is an extreme example, but it’s what I think states like NY, in particular, face.
By the way, Manila is listed as the densest city in the world, at about 46,000 people per sq km. To put that in perspective, that is 4-5 people per 100 sq meters. In the U.S., the average size of a new home is about 250 sq meters. So the population density in Manila is more than twice that of a suburban family with 2-3 kids when they are locked down in their home (and that’s not even including the yard, which probably doubles or more the available space). Think about that, the next time you’re getting cabin fever.
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