Pandemics, Coffee Shops, and Writing

Randall_Oelerich

Randall_Oelerich

Veteran
If some of you are like me, you go to the local coffee shops to write and consume mass quantities of coffee like a Conehead. Not to sound like Chicken Little but keep an eye on the growing flu virus outbreaks in the news the past few days, it seems to be spreading at a substantial rate. What does this have to do with writing screenplays? Coffee shops are a great place for flu viruses to spread, with the baristas touching your coffee mugs and others and such--so be safe when writing (we need everybody here on dvxuser to survive any epidemics, keep writing those oscar winning scripts!), consider stocking up on coffee to brew at home if this flu virus goes epidemic or pandemic--what a great job, writing, in that we can still continue to do it just about anywhere, home or otherwise.

Yesterday morning I heard of 20-80 cases in Mexico, then this morning 1000 cases.. Seeding itself also to parts of the USA now. The WHO.org is concerned. Anyhow, just be safe, load up on home brew coffee (by the way, did I mention most of my investments are in Folger's Coffee stock, LOL?).
~randall
 
Last edited:
Whoa, good to know Randall. I've been busy with things lately and haven't really been following the news much this past week.

Damn Flu. I'll burn you little buggers with my flame thrower.

:zombie_smiley::zombie_smiley::zombie_smiley: :violent5:

Oh, and if you are going to stick with home brewed coffee, for God sakes man get something better than Folgers!!!!!! There have been nuts and bolts found in their grounds. Seriously.
 
I hope it turns out be a false alarm, honestly, but if not... well, I am buying a few extra cases of bottled water, canned goods and rice and beans and such. At least the coffee store where I write (Caribou Coffee) most mornings now put out their outdoor tables and chairs, so I can write out there without the confined virus mixing bowl inside if people get to coughing up a storm. Oh yeah, about coffee for home brew-- hazelnut creme, my favorite, oh man the elixir of the gods!
 
Talk about a basis for a true horror story, this is it!

Swine Flu May Be Named Event of ‘International Concern’ by WHO


By Jason Gale
April 25 (Bloomberg) -- The World Health Organization is set to declare the deadly swine flu virus outbreak in Mexico and the U.S. a global concern, potentially prompting travel restrictions, said a person familiar with the matter.
An emergency committee of the WHO in Geneva will declare the outbreak “a public health event of international concern” in a 4 p.m. teleconference today, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting is confidential. In response, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan may raise the level of pandemic alert, which could lead to travel restrictions aimed at curbing the disease’s spread.
“These levels of pandemic alert are all signals for action,” said Malik Peiris, a professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, who has studied influenza viruses for more than a decade. “Raising the level of alertness to influenza, especially in returning travelers, would be a relevant thing to do.”
Human-to-human spread of the previously unseen H1N1 swine influenza in Mexico and the U.S. is heightening concern that the virus may spark a pandemic. At least 68 people have died and more than 1,000 have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms in the Mexico City region in the past month, Jose Cordova, Mexico’s Health Minister, told reporters yesterday. The government has shut schools and distributed face masks.
Sari Setiogi, a WHO spokeswoman in Geneva, declined to comment on the agency’s response, saying it will depend on the outcome of today’s meeting.
Closing Theaters
Mexico’s Social Security Institute shut all of the theaters and cultural centers it operates nationwide to avoid spreading the flu strain -- reminiscent of actions implemented during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. Travel curbs imposed there damaged economies throughout the region, where that virus circulated most widely.
In Singapore, where 33 infected people died, gross domestic product shrank 11.4 percent in the second quarter of 2003 because of the severe acute respiratory syndrome.
Swine flu was confirmed in 20 of the deaths so far in Mexico. Of 14 tissue samples tested from Mexico, half were a genetic match with the swine flu reported in eight people in California and Texas, the Atlanta-based Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said.
“We do not know whether this swine flu virus or some other influenza virus will lead to the next pandemic,” Richard Besser, the CDC’s acting director, told reporters yesterday on a teleconference. “Scientists around the world continue to monitor the virus and take its threat seriously.”
Pandemic Threat
The new influenza strain, a conglomeration of genes from swine, bird and human viruses, poses the biggest threat of a large-scale flu pandemic since the emergence of the H5N1 strain that has killed millions of birds and hundreds of people, said William Schaffner, an influenza expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
“It re-combined to create something totally new,” David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health minister, told reporters yesterday. “How, when, or where it did that I don’t think we know. What it will lead to is impossible to predict.”
WHO’s alert level is at level 3, meaning there is no, or very limited, human-to-human transmission of a potential pandemic virus. Officials at the agency have said the global spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus since 2003 has put the world closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century’s three pandemics occurred.
Alert System
WHO uses a six-step alert system to tell the world what preparations to take in response to a pandemic. Flu can spread quickly when a new strain emerges because no one has natural immunity and a vaccine takes months to develop. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people, doctors said.
Teams of disease investigators have been sent to California and Texas to trace how the malady has spread, and the U.S. offered to send scientists to Mexico, said the CDC’s Besser. U.S. hospitals are being asked to collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms, said Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt, in a telephone interview yesterday.
‘Sense of Urgency’
“They are asking us who work in hospitals to go to our emergency rooms and our pediatric wards to gather specimens and start testing them,” Schaffner said. “This has a sense of urgency about it.”
Mexico’s government has closed schools, museums, movie theaters and libraries in Mexico City and surrounding areas until further notice, according to an e-mail from the National Arts and Culture Council. It’s also handing out free facemasks and extending the deadline for filing taxes until May 31, Cordova said. A million doses of antiviral medicine are available for distribution, he said.
Twenty-four cases, including three deaths, have been reported in San Luis Potosi, in central Mexico, and four cases have been found in Mexicali near the border with the U.S., according to the WHO.
Three main human flu strains -- H3N2, H1N1 and type-B -- circulate and cause 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year in seasonal epidemics, according to the World Health Organization. Pandemics occur when a novel influenza A-type virus, to which almost no one has natural immunity, emerges and begins spreading.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in Singapore at j.gale@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 25, 2009 08:06 EDT
 
Last edited:
kyotonils said:
Relax. If you are drinking Folgers, you may as well be dead already.
Click to expand...

True, LOL. This morning I picked up some ground beans, freshly ground, Hazelnut Vanilla Creme; sweet beans from the gods! (on the topic of the flu virus, just heard from a friend that his friend in Texas said they are closing schools; also new cases popping up in Kansas and New York since yesterday; this new virus has the same genetic subtype [H1N1] as the 1918 pandemic flu virus, noteworthy in a horrific way. Very similar speading as with that pandemic virus, though I hope this one fizzles out; why does this almost feel like a viral zombie movie like Resident Evil perhaps about to happen in real life? wow.).

(EDIT: Oh sh*t, this morning I am reading headlines now of possible cases in New Zealand, Spain, and Hong Kong. I also ordered 250 surgical masks to help protect against airborn flu virus particles, nice price off amazon, 50/$5)
 
Last edited:
Damn...

Anyone think I should I be telling my folks to come stay with me for a while up here in Toronto? They're in Scottsdale.
 
Mattykins said:
The same thing happened with SARS. Nothing but panic came from that. Relax. You aren't going to die.
Click to expand...

I won't die. I have food and water (and coffee!) to last me just in case, surgical masks, streaming Netflix movies and of course World of Warcraft to amuse me in times of quarantine (in between writing the next great screenplay), LOL. I think it would be only prudent to go buy some surgical masks today before they are gone from the store shelves.

Will this virus be the big one? Probably not. Then again there was the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million and caused illness in another 500 million (ratchet that up to today's global population and one could have 100 million die *if* a pandemic virus happens of a similar nature-- and experts say we are due for such a pandemic virus any year now. I really hope this current new virus (and it is new, never before seen) does NOT go pandemic. But this new virus does have the same basic molecular structure and immunological subtypes as the 1918 virus that went Armageddon.

Today (Sunday April 26): "Reporting from Washington -- Federal officials today declared a public health emergency involving human swine flu, warning Americans to prepare for widespread outbreaks now or in the future, yet urging them not to panic." (LA Times Newspaper)
 
Last edited:
I'm curious. I understand from the Asian Bird flu outbreak, people all over Asia wore these mask, but the mask has openings larger than the size of a virus. If this is so, how will a mask keep out a virus? They offer some psychological placebo effect but actually stopping a virus seems to be another story.
 
Last edited:
10s said:
I'm curious. I understand from the Asian Bird flu outbreak, people all over Asia wore these mask, but the mask has openings larger than the size of a virus. If this is so, how will a mask keep out a virus? They offer some psychological placebo effect but actually stopping a virus seems to be another story.
Click to expand...

It is more than placebo, wearing surgical masks actual does help, a new study finds:
http://www.livescience.com/health/090126-flu-mask.html
I suspect that although the virus particles themselves are billionths of a meter in size (nanometer scale), and thus would in theory pass through pores in the masks, the virus particles are often part of larger diameter respiratory droplets (from coughing and sneezing) shed by infected persons that can float in the air for some time. I would think the masks are able to block the respiratory droplets carrying flu virus particles. Masks, frequent handwashing, wearing cotton gloves if out and about, and avoiding crowds-- all simple cheap steps to take if an epidemic takes shape.

EDIT: Thought I would add this youtube video, not for the guy panicking in the video, for the first 30 seconds or so where there is seen a nice animated epidemiological model of how such a pandemic would spread over the United States. Notice that the number of cases is hardly noticeable for even the first month, but then things take off. (BTW I don't mean to come off as 'obsessed' about this topic, LOL-- it is just that it is part of my day job to be up on this and I am dealing with it right now; just thought I would share a bit here with you fellow writers)
 
Last edited:
OK, this is helpful, thank you! I didn't know this about the masks, maybe they do help some. Now if I can find some around.

No you don't seem overly panicky given the nature of what this could become. My grandfather lost his hearing in the 1919 outbreak so I do respect these things. Let's hope it isn't the big one... as predicted will happen at some point in time.

(My bad judgement/ poor taste view) On top of this, -- this could be the source of many good stories... my creative thinking cap is already on!
 
According to a soundbite we ran tonight from some muckity mucks in the WA state guv'ment, nearly all of the folks who died in Mexico were people who waited to the absolute last second to go see a doctor. All the cases in the U.S. have been mild, with only one requiring hospitalization (supposedly for something else). Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and if you start to get sick, stay home and drink fluids.
 
Maybe this is viral marketing going viral! Look to the makers of surgical masks and find out who they hired to do their marketing...

Anyway can we cook up a dvxuser virus where Fortune 500 companies all panic to get professionally produced videos made before they catch a virus?
 
Randall_Oelerich said:
It is more than placebo, wearing surgical masks actual does help, a new study finds:
http://www.livescience.com/health/090126-flu-mask.html
I suspect that although the virus particles themselves are billionths of a meter in size (nanometer scale), and thus would in theory pass through pores in the masks, the virus particles are often part of larger diameter respiratory droplets (from coughing and sneezing) shed by infected persons that can float in the air for some time. I would think the masks are able to block the respiratory droplets carrying flu virus particles. Masks, frequent handwashing, wearing cotton gloves if out and about, and avoiding crowds-- all simple cheap steps to take if an epidemic takes shape.

EDIT: Thought I would add this youtube video, not for the guy panicking in the video, for the first 30 seconds or so where there is seen a nice animated epidemiological model of how such a pandemic would spread over the United States. Notice that the number of cases is hardly noticeable for even the first month, but then things take off. (BTW I don't mean to come off as 'obsessed' about this topic, LOL-- it is just that it is part of my day job to be up on this and I am dealing with it right now; just thought I would share a bit here with you fellow writers)
Click to expand...

a surgical mask does offer some protection, but an NIOSH-approved N95 disposable particulate respirator will be better. if you can get some surgical respirators, go that route, but if those aren't available, you can get N95 respirators at hardware stores and some pharmacies.

something like this should be good.
 
Last edited:
Here in Spain the six cases that they identified where from people that yesterday came back from Mexico after holidays, one of them (the one nearest from me, in Bilbao) went to the hospital right from the airport to see a doctor because he wasn't feeling good. They found out that he had a high probability of having the virus, so they looked for the people in that flight to look if anyone more was ill, but none was infected (infected, this word really sound filmic...).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top