Coronavirus / COVID-19 in the United States

[KMack]

Seems all of the NCAA conference tournament and NCAA tournament basketball games will be played with no fans in attendance. Fans have been banned.

[Smaland]

[Smaland]

[Wegner]

Apparently, people are making forts out of all the rolls of toilet paper they've been hoarding and hiding from COVID-19 in them.

[Arsen_]

The length of queue to this mall in Los Angeles just shocked me. I have never seen anything like that.

[Smaland]

[The Lawspeaker]

DIY manufactures scramble to reduce shortages, as public health officials send mixed messages about the efficacy of broader use. Full text and links: https://reason.com/video/health-care-...

"Everyone at this point is kind of on their own, making ready for being able to reuse―especially masks―but also things like gowns and plastic sheets to be able to keep our barriers when we're doing difficult procedures with patients," says Case Newsom, an emergency medicine doctor based in Denver. Doctors around the country are running dangerously low on N95 masks, which protocol says they should wear and then dispose of every time they walk out of an infected patient's room. So they're reusing the same masks repeatedly and learning to sew their own surgical masks. "My colleagues on the East Coast…are facing significant shortages," says Newsom. "So they're busy at work creating UV decontamination ovens on their own because those are expensive and difficult to come by, but easy enough to produce." The federal government estimates that medical professionals will need 3.5 billion masks if the worst-case projections come true. The U.S. currently had about 1 percent of that number on hand at the beginning of March. Charities and major corporations have donated masks to hospitals, and manufacturers like Honeywell and 3M have stepped up production. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked President Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act to force companies to start making masks. And yet official channels likely won't come close to meeting the needs of health care workers, so some technologists are taking matters into their own hands. But will government officials adhere to existing regulations and slow down these efforts? And if mask production increased to serve the entire population, could it hasten the end of the extreme social distancing crippling our economy?