2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (Vaccination 2021 Edition)

Fat Hippo

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He was also sitting pretty close to Raab in Parliament while Raab was coughing his guts up. The Parliament in which absolutely zero social distancing appeared to be in effect.
To be fair British parliament is like a can of sardines, you'd need to cut out 80% of the people inside to maintain social distancing...

Hey, now there's an idea. Maybe with less people there'd be less random shouting and more intelligent conversation.
 

Phoenixmgs

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How cautious is enough? Now "as cautious as needed to feel at ease" is fine, however people (that I've personally seen and heard, not saying you do this) project their feelings to everyone and now they feel they have the moral high ground to shame and guilt them for not meeting their standard.
Yeah, I have a friend that totally thinks he knows everything along with having the moral high ground and posts at least once a day on Facebook to STAY HOME. He has a wife that is a nurse and he's ex-military and also a "biologist" (degree-wise but not practicing) so he thinks anyone not obeying the shelter-in-place to an absolute T is both endangering his wife and also not disciplined because not obeying orders (military and all). A couple days back he posted that people aren't protecting themselves and don't deserve to be protected anymore and he's not going to protect us anymore (not that he ever really was). He says the TOP failed us and now the BOTTOM is failing by not staying home even though enough time hasn't even passed to see how much the infection rate has changed due to the said orders. I live in the Chicagoland area and people are doing a pretty good job staying home and such vs say the South. He loves to say there's going to be martial law and he's going to get called back in and he's going to show NO MERCY, and I'm like the only martial law that's going to happen during this will be on your TV starring Sammo Hung and Arsenio Hall. He's also quite a hypocrite in the fact that he had people over to his house like a day or 2 before the stay-at-home orders were put in place putting his wife in direct danger yet people doing that very thing now, he totally yells at them telling him how much more right and disciplined he is than you are. Sure, the orders weren't technically in place yet but it was serious at that point; shouldn't a biologist and medical professional be smarter than that? He loves to lead with that he's a biologist and his wife is a medical professional telling you what to do or not do with regards to the situation. Yet anyone researching the virus on the Internet knows more than him or his wife. He also loves to refer to normal citizens as "civis" and that he thinks being a vet makes him better than "civis".
 

Kyrian007

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Well, I'm in broadcast journalism... overnight. So the people calling us up screaming that we have bias "a" (whatever side they are against) whenever a story isn't flattering to their viewpoint, are now being joined by people calling us screaming that we aren't broadcasting the "truth" about COVID-19 (whatever bullshit conspiracy they saw on whatever bullshit social media platform they frequent that spreads bullshit to morons.) I'm really close to giving up and just giving people the go ahead on-air to drink bleach because it prevents coronavirus. Basically, I'm starting to root for the virus. Maybe if it does kill us all the earth will be better off.

Then I remember that callers are less than 1% of the total audience and am just happy that broadcast media is considered "essential" and I managed to dodge a couple of rounds of layoffs (although that means I'm doing about 5 people's jobs right now.)
 

SckizoBoy

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第一件事:我是華人,不是"中國人",(而我是華僑人.而且而且我的母語是廣東話),我覺得很可惜大部分的西方國家的人不了解這個分別.

Anyway, pointless introit aside, I've followed the course of this pandemic on and off since it started in my part of the world (suffice to say, I'm uncomfortably close to China, with equal stress on 'uncomfortably' and 'close') and I've kind of lost energy to get angry at the CCP and WHO with the latest BS to come out of the WHO DG's gob and the CCP's public policy.


Months-long? Seriously? First sign of 'insults', he'd've gone crying to the CCP and it'd be slapped all over state media with lots of hand-wringing, tutting and 'I told you so' saying that the upstart island government was bad news for everyone and the people should come back to the loving embrace of the motherland or some other ridiculous fuckery.

Now, that aside, I appreciate the general solidarity in the west that people as a whole have had for victims (of Chinese ethnicity or otherwise, and there's been a lot of otherwise) of racially motivated harassment and assault. Fortunately, in the grand scheme of things, these incidences have been rare, isolated and condemned, almost universally.

But now comes China and a society that is, regrettably, so morally myopic is beggars belief. Oh looky, plastered throughout the news: westerners are racist towards Chinese ('cos screw other SE-Asians, they don't matter), look how degenerate they are, never mind the context. But riddle me this: what is the status of foreigners, western or otherwise, in China at this moment in time? And aside from groups of YTers who have limited exposure (and guaranteed demonetised content): what mode of information dissemination is covering this... at all? Anywhere? Within China itself, they don't give a damn 'cos it's just daily life (and let's face it, it is the CCP's state run media we're referring to here), and outside of China it's too much work and hassle to get verification and it was ever so convenient that they got the perfect excuse to kick most US journalists out 'cos Trump was being mean (not defending Trump, hate the guy, and his politics at that) and kick the rest out too while they're at it.

Addendum: yes, yes, I'm aware that I could say "I'm ethnically Chinese", but it's not about what labels I give myself, it's about what labels others give me (with or without my knowledge) and the assumptions they draw from those labels.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Discussion topics off my mind:
How accurate are the epidemic models now that strict restrictions and other regulations and measures are put in place? I ask this because while the big European countries and the US have patient steep upward patient graphs for new cases, here in Finland they have recently increased testing and new cases are down. How many will go through the infection without testing? I've even read figures like 19 out of 20 or even 29 out of 30 that aren't tested have COVID-19 at some point anyway. 20% of the population go through with it is the low estimate which seems high, but I guess we will eventually know.
Some early publications suggest the number of people who have had covid-19 may be ~50 times higher than official records. These studies looked at places were testing has been quite limited (USA and China).

On the downside, that still only means about 1-3% of the population have had it... and yet it's caused this much chaos. The occasionally talked-about herd immunity requires upwards of 60%.

Incidentally, if we use this idea of 1-3% infected, we might estimate that the UK (for instance) has had about 1-2 million infected. That's around a 1-2% mortality rate, in line with many predictions even from early on. Thus I might tentatively suggest if you want to know how many people have contracted covid-19 in a country, multiply the deaths by 50-100.
 

Baffle

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I see the US is letting Barry Scott guide their efforts.

BANG! And the human host is gone!
 

Agema

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There's a growing body of evidence that suggests that the amount of viruses you get exposed to determines how ill you become. In the case of Boris Johnson, who flagrantly visited a Covid-19 quarantine ward and shook every patient's hand, it is not entirely unexpected that he would fall severely ill afterwards. It is the same reason why nurses and doctors get hit much harder then the general population on average, because they spend much more time around the virus and thus get subjected to much higher concentrations.
Boris Johnson most certainly did not shake the hands of patients on a coronavirus ward, whatever guff he said. The hospital staff would not have permitted it, not in a million years. He might have shaken the hands of people on a hospital visit, but they won't have been covid-19 patients.
 

Fieldy409

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There's a growing body of evidence that suggests that the amount of viruses you get exposed to determines how ill you become. In the case of Boris Johnson, who flagrantly visited a Covid-19 quarantine ward and shook every patient's hand, it is not entirely unexpected that he would fall severely ill afterwards. It is the same reason why nurses and doctors get hit much harder then the general population on average, because they spend much more time around the virus and thus get subjected to much higher concentrations.
See this is the kind of thing that when I stop to think about it seems really obvious now but I never thought of viruses that way before. I used to think either you have a virus or you don't and that's it. But I guess if If the virus multiplies until your immune system can beat it then obviously the amount of virus bodies(?) that enter you in the first place to start the process of multiplying theirselves is important, thats just obvious maths.
 

Baffle

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All the peasants I've butchered in Bannerlord are grateful I've saved them from the government's handling of the virus.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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I see the US is letting Barry Scott guide their efforts.

BANG! And the human host is gone!
When the only people taking whatever the orange toad waffles as worthy advice are his devout acolytes, I see this as potentially a self-solving issue.
 

Agema

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All the peasants I've butchered in Bannerlord are grateful I've saved them from the government's handling of the virus.
I have learnt things about inevitability since covid-19.

I conquered Poland, Norway, France; then I took Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, broke out of encirclement at Stalingrad, won at Kharkov, Kursk, and Minsk, and despite all these huge victories my stupid country is still losing the war along a series of predetermined campaign scenarios.
 

Yoshi

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Us in Australia are just laughing at trump and the stupid Americans who are protesting about the lock down laws and closure of shops at the moment.
how do those idiots not realize that if even just one of them contracts the virus, they're exposing hundreds of thousands of other people to virus as make so much easier for the virus to spread around the country, therefore making the lockdown laws even more important?

yeah there's some stupid people in Australia who don't do the right thing but the vast majority of Australians are actually Winning at the moment and doing the right thing by staying home unless absolutely necessary.

the Health Minister even confirmed that our National COVID19 cases are at the lower end of what the health modelling predicted they would be a month ago saying on the news just today that
Australia's Chief Medical Officer has given a glowing appraisal of the country's coronavirus response, saying cases in the Northern Territory and ACT are so low "that there's no statistical purpose in showing them".
 
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Thaluikhain

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When the only people taking whatever the orange toad waffles as worthy advice are his devout acolytes, I see this as potentially a self-solving issue.
His devoted acolytes tend to overlook that they are supposed to inject themselves with disinfectant or whatever, and tune in for hating Mexicans or whatever instead.

Us in Australia are just laughing at trump and the stupid Americans who are protesting about the lock down laws and closure of shops at the moment.
how do those idiots not realize that if even just one of them contracts the virus, they're exposing hundreds of thousands of other people to virus as make so much easier for the virus to spread around the country, therefore making the lockdown laws even more important?

yeah there's some stupid people in Australia who don't do the right thing but the vast majority of Australias is actually Winning at the moment and doing the right thing by staying home unless absolutely necessary.
Yeah, for all the (legitimate complaints) about Australian society/Scotty from Marketing/whatever, our response has been, if not perfect, than perfectly adequate. NZ/Jacinta Ardern is still making us look bad (as usual), but we're leading the way compared to a lot of countries this time.
 
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Baffle

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I conquered Poland, Norway, France; then I took Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, broke out of encirclement at Stalingrad, won at Kharkov, Kursk, and Minsk, and despite all these huge victories my stupid country is still losing the war along a series of predetermined campaign scenarios.
You're still finding time to butcher peasants though, right? I'm bumbling round in Bannerlord with my head well and truly stuck up my arse (it's safe, you can't catch Covid from your own arse), but I'm still showing peasants why they're peasants and I'm not.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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Well this might complicate matters.

Coronavirus has been detected on particles of air pollution by scientists investigating whether this could enable it to be carried over longer distances and increase the number of people infected.

The work is preliminary and it is not yet known if the virus remains viable on pollution particles and in sufficient quantity to cause disease.

The Italian scientists used standard techniques to collect outdoor air pollution samples at one urban and one industrial site in Bergamo province and identified a gene highly specific to Covid-19 in multiple samples. The detection was confirmed by blind testing at an independent laboratory.

Leonardo Setti at the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the work, said it was important to investigate if the virus could be carried more widely by air pollution.

“I am a scientist and I am worried when I don’t know,” he said. “If we know, we can find a solution. But if we don’t know, we can only suffer the consequences.”

Two other research groups have suggested air pollution particles could help coronavirus travel further in the air.

A statistical analysis by Setti’s team suggests higher levels of particle pollution could explain higher rates of infection in parts of northern Italy before a lockdown was imposed, an idea supported by another preliminary analysis. The region is one of the most polluted in Europe.

Neither of the studies by Setti’s team have been peer-reviewed and therefore have not been endorsed by independent scientists. But experts agree their proposal is plausible and requires investigation.

Previous studies have shown that air pollution particles do harbour microbes and that pollution is likely to have carried the viruses causing bird flu, measles and foot-and-mouth disease over considerable distances.

The potential role of air pollution particles is linked to the broader question of how the coronavirus is transmitted. Large virus-laden droplets from infected people’s coughs and sneezes fall to the ground within a metre or two. But much smaller droplets, less than 5 microns in diameter, can remain in the air for minutes to hours and travel further.

Experts are not sure whether these tiny airborne droplets can cause coronavirus infections, though they know the 2003 Sars coronavirus was spread in the air and that the new virus can remain viable for hours in tiny droplets.

But researchers say the importance of potential airborne transmission, and the possible boosting role of pollution particles, mean it must not be ruled out without evidence.

Prof Jonathan Reid at Bristol University in the UK is researching airborne transmission of coronavirus. “It is perhaps not surprising that while suspended in air, the small droplets could combine with background urban particles and be carried around.”

He said the virus had been detected in tiny droplets collected indoors in China.

Setti said tiny droplets between 0.1 and 1 micron may travel further when coalesced with pollution particles up to 10 microns than on their own. This is because the combined particle is larger and less dense than the droplet and can remain buoyed by the air for longer.

“The pollution particle is like a micro-airplane and the passengers are the droplets,” said Sett. Reid is more cautious: “I think the very small change in the size of the [combined] particles is unlikely to play much of a role.”

Prof Frank Kelly at Imperial College London said the idea of pollution particles carrying the virus further afield was an interesting one. “It is possible, but I would like to see this work repeated by two or three groups.”


Another expert, Prof John Sodeau at University College Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, said: “The work seems plausible. But that is the bottom line at the moment, and plausible [particle] interactions are not always biologically viable and may have no effect in the atmosphere.” He said the normal course of scientific research might take two or three years to confirm such findings.

Other research has indicated correlations between increased Covid-19 deaths and higher levels of air pollution before the pandemic. Long-term exposure to dirty air is known to damage lung health, which could make people more vulnerable to Covid-19.
His devoted acolytes tend to overlook that they are supposed to inject themselves with disinfectant or whatever, and tune in for hating Mexicans or whatever instead.
True, it was merely an indulgence in naive hope for a second there.
 

Yoshi

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His devoted acolytes tend to overlook that they are supposed to inject themselves with disinfectant or whatever, and tune in for hating Mexicans or whatever instead.



Yeah, for all the (legitimate complaints) about Australian society/Scotty from Marketing/whatever, our response has been, if not perfect, than perfectly adequate. NZ/Jacinta Ardern is still making us look bad (as usual), but we're leading the way compared to a lot of countries this time.
it's pissing me off when i've been going to work over the past 2 weeks though. i train in it in from the city to the suburb for work.
the city is still dead for the most part thankfully but in the shopping centre/train station i get off at to go to myself, it's an Asian dedicated part of my state and alot of the shops, most of which are fast fried asian take away food court type shops are starting to open making alot of people starting flood back to the shopping centre.

HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT TO STAY HOME GOD DAMN IT?!?!?!!!

at least i have a genuine reason to be out and about since i'm a Public servant and considered an essential worker. but people running about the shopping centre at shops besides Woolies and the Pharmacy, and people just lounging about outside having a smoke just piss me the hell off
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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You're still finding time to butcher peasants though, right? I'm bumbling round in Bannerlord with my head well and truly stuck up my arse (it's safe, you can't catch Covid from your own arse), but I'm still showing peasants why they're peasants and I'm not.
I'm pretty sure the peasants had been released from the feudal system by 1940, so sort of no. I am however slaughtering the proletariat in huge quantities, if that's a suitable equivalent.
 

Tireseas

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Finally qualified for a test this week and got a negative result.

How's that for an inaugeral post? Now who do I talk to about confirming my account as one of the old ones?
 

Neuromancer

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Finally qualified for a test this week and got a negative result.

How's that for an inaugeral post? Now who do I talk to about confirming my account as one of the old ones?
Hooray for being negative!

Go to this thread and post your old profile.