- New Cases: 43,355
- New Deaths: 943
'Close to 100% accuracy': Helsinki airport uses sniffer dogs to detect Covid
Researchers running Helsinki pilot scheme say dogs can identify virus in seconds
Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.
A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.
“It’s very promising,” said Hielm-Björkman. “If it works, it could prove a good screening method in other places” such as hospitals, care homes and at sporting and cultural events.
Whatever works is fine by me - and the emotional support we get from randomly anthropomorphizing critters can be of some value - but it seems there were very similar claims made about Cancer-Sniffing Dogs once upon a time, so I think I'll stick with something a bit more traditional until it can be proven. (yes - I'm a little cranky this morning)
Wanna know why you don't run government like a business? WaPo:
Virus’s unseen hot zone: The American farm
Across the country, fruit growers blocked testing of seasonal farmworkers and told those who caught the coronavirus to keep it quiet. County and state officials were largely unable to stop them
In Yakima County, Wash., some fruit orchard owners declined on-site testing of workers by health departments at the height of harvest season even as coronavirus infections spiked. In Monterey, Calif., workers at some farms claimed foremen asked them to hide positive diagnoses from other crew members. And in Collier County, Fla., health officials did not begin widespread testing of farmworkers until the end of harvest, at which point the workers had already migrated northward.
At the height of harvest season, growers supplying some of America’s biggest agricultural companies and grocery store chains flouted public health guidelines to limit testing and obscure coronavirus outbreaks, according to thousands of pages of state and local records reviewed by The Washington Post.
At the same time, state agencies and growers were slow to determine how and when to test workers, what protocols to adopt when workers tested positive, and how to institute contact tracing, advocates say. They say that there should have been mandatory personal protective equipment and clear guidance on worker safety at the federal and state levels.
Worker advocates say the failures put millions of workers at greater risk of contracting and spreading the virus among themselves and to other Americans as they crossed state lines to move with the harvest season.
Migrant farmworkers die in Canada, and Mexico wants answers
The struggles to contain the virus among migrant farmworkers are documented in internal state and county agriculture and health department records, as well as email exchanges with farm bureaus, grower associations, and public health and worker advocacy groups that were obtained by the Documenting COVID-19 project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation through public records requests and shared with The Post. These documents and additional interviews by The Post show a pattern that extended across more than a dozen agricultural counties in 10 states — and that largely withstood officials’ attempts to stop the spread of the virus among agricultural workers.
“If this is an essential industry, why is it we can’t at least take the kind of steps needed to figure out where we need to do interventions?” asked Don Villarejo, a former researcher at the California Institute for Rural Studies who has been analyzing coronavirus data on farmworkers. “My mantra is that all pandemics are local; if you don’t track every aspect of people’s lives including where they work and where they live, then you can never do a proper intervention."
And there's that weird dichotomy that's inherent in the "American way" of doing things. You have to have the tactical flexibility of an autonomous local authority because orders coming down from some Central Command won't fit every situation out there in the field. But at the same time, you have to have an overall strategic plan so there's some consistency in the approach - some guidance that the big brains at the home office can bring to bear.
Our scattershot response to COVID-19 has been a dismal fucking failure, and I think it's consistent with how the Radical Libertarians(*) want things to play out.
* Nancy MacLean - Democracy In Chains
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