I am slightly shocked how much the developers ignore the severity of this bug.
How are they ignoring it?
If you want a safe quick fix, reduce the 50% max APR to something like 5%. This is one single variable and surely can not break anything else.
And what happens if that safe quick fix somehow breaks consensus. There is a process in place now to prevent bigger problems from occurring due to a fix being rushed. The last time a fix was rushed for an even bigger bug, the "fix" ending up forking the blockchain and the real fix required rolling back many hours worth of blocks (thankfully there were apparently no double spend issues). Let's avoid having a situation where the cure is worse than the disease, and follow proper testing procedure.
The devs are taking it seriously, it seems that there is already a
patch being prepared, however these things still need to be properly reviewed and tested before release.
By the way, to the people with shorts expiring in the next few days (which is actually not a lot of money by the way), you do know you can sell your spare BTS (which you should always have if you are shorting) for BTC and then use the BTC to buy BitUSD via an outside exchange or a bridge like metaexchange, and then use the BitUSD to cover the short, right? That does add some fees due to the various spreads, but I bet it is much less than 10%. Just something that might be worth looking into.