COVID-19 in your part of the world

[kitten]

it is extremely weird how many functions this thread is performing lol

[FinalBaton]

All I will say on this matter, there are people calling this virus a hoax, my mom has it, seems to be a milder case (she's 69 with COPD). People like that just piss me off.

No doubt. The last thing we need in times like these, is conspiracy theorists who :

1 - are not focusing on applying safety measures and promoting them

2 - are spreading fear in the population. I mean is there worst leadership than that? trying to scare/discourage your battalion before going to the front/while in the trench? what useless brother-in-arm these are

I hate the hoax crowd too

[Blinge]

Just heard some American chap arguing with a UK radio host talking about the protests and muh freedoms.
Compared the anti-lockdown sentiment to Rosa Parks.

[headlesshobbs]

People in WI were told they have to be in person to vote.

My county went from 200+ to 1k just because of that. Now three meat plants in my area had to be shut down due to workers bringing it in and forced them to re-sanitize everything.

[BrainΦΠΦTemple]

scientist zOoms in on coronavirus under a microscope to find a tiny angry chinese businessman shouting obscenities in a thiCk accent while holding a briefcase with the label "covid-19"

[headlesshobbs]

scientist zOoms in on coronavirus under a microscope to find a tiny angry chinese businessman man shouting obscenities in a thiCk accent while holding a briefcase with the label "covid-19"

Sounds accurate.

[FinalBaton]

So wait, the preppers are the first ones to crack? because they want a fucking haircut???

[orange808]

You say you care. Okay. How much?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888

How do we handle that?

[BulletMagnet]

Your state's finances hit particularly hard by the epidemic? Just go bankrupt, says Mitch!

Yeeeaaaahhhh fuck yooouuuu yeeeahhhhh.

EDIT: Also, a bit of additional food for thought on the "liberate" protests.

[vol.2]

So this isn't about my part of the world, but I see this thread has pushed past that, so yeah. This has got me a bit worried.

Seemed to pass under the radar yesterday, but it strikes me as potentially important that China is seeing people who recovered suddenly test positive again after 50-70 days.
The upshot is that they are no longer symptomatic, but they could very well be contagious. It's currently unclear. Seems important to know.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKCN2240HI

[BareKnuckleRoo]

When Trump makes idiotic suggestions that UV light or injecting disinfectants could be what it takes to kill the virus, it's not just the danger to his gullible followers that's what makes him so dangerous. It's his blatant contempt for qualified medical professionals as a whole, which he puts on display when he suggests his ass-pull suggestions that clearly would injure or kill people are equivalent in value to the qualified opinions of medical doctors who are supposed to be the ones providing guidance to the president and his statements.

When he does shit like this, he's basically suggesting that the only reason COVID-19 exists is that nobody among the millions of qualified medical professionals out there thought of these "brilliant" ideas as possible "cures". His outright hostility to science is endangering his country, and the world.

[FinalBaton]

Here the govt are taking a hybrid approach that's sorta interesting :

after HARD XTREEM enforced confinment, they will soon start a very gradual deconfinment they say, so that younger stronger peeps can build immunity.

That's pretty early deconfinment, seeing as some european countries just started the process, and the bug hit 3 weeks later over here.

We will see how it goes, they should annonce their plan for gradual deconfinment on monday.

[ZacharyB]

...so that younger stronger peeps can build immunity.

How does that work? You either get sick or you don't. Unless they're saying "let the younger ones out so that they can get sick first and then get the antibodies that will allow them to become shields."

It doesn't jive well with what vol.2 said above, where you can get "infected" again with no symptoms and possibly become a reservoir.


Since this is the first time in recent history that a massive pandemic is forcing attention on a virus's activity, I wonder if we'll discover more about how contagion works for all viruses. Things like, do all viruses do this, and we just never noticed before because the other ones are more inconsequential?

[GaijinPunch]

Since this is the first time in recent history that a massive pandemic is forcing attention on a virus's activity, I wonder if we'll discover more about how contagion works for all viruses. Things like, do all viruses do this, and we just never noticed before because the other ones are more inconsequential?

We already know this stuff. They latch on to the Lysol-lacking proteins in our body.

[TransatlanticFoe]

So this isn't about my part of the world, but I see this thread has pushed past that, so yeah. This has got me a bit worried.

Seemed to pass under the radar yesterday, but it strikes me as potentially important that China is seeing people who recovered suddenly test positive again after 50-70 days.
The upshot is that they are no longer symptomatic, but they could very well be contagious. It's currently unclear. Seems important to know.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKCN2240HI

Take that one with a pinch of salt for the moment. There are different tests which are reliable to different extents. It presents a broad enough picture over large sample sizes but the reality is they can give false positives and false negatives - drilling down to individual cases does expose the margin of error.

"Second infections" are, at this stage, likely the result of flawed testing and lingering infection from weak immune responses. It is too early to say for sure though and caution is the correct approach, but don't let it scare you until you REALLY need to be scared - otherwise you just live in fear your whole life. A lot of things get reported right now because 24/7 news culture just loves blurting stuff out as it gets it and waits for context later.

The data is poor - deaths are inconsistently reported between countries and regions, testing varies in accuracy, lag exists in reporting and that's inconsistent in nature too. There's too much margin for error in pretty much everything, it makes a scientist's job virtually impossible because you can barely tell the signal from the noise. A broad picture is the best anyone can do right now, it'll be history that judges whether it was right to be conservative or whether we should have all been Sweden about it.

[Mischief Maker]

Reality is a script written by a hack.

This morning I'm walking my dog and we see an ambulance across the street. I rubberneck and see a guy sitting up on the bed, then notice all the EMTs and cops are wearing masks. Probably a covid case. So we hot-footed it out of there.

Then at noon I'm on my way to take my dog for his afternoon walk around the capitol, and hear car horns in the distance. I'm about a block away and see a huge flatbed truck shipping port-a-johns to the capitol. I spot people holding signs and the only word I can read is "open." I put 2 and 2 together and we turned right around.

There's a goddamn MAGA rally happening on the capitol today to end the quarantine. The DeVos family probably paid for the port-a-johns. I hope they pack really close together.

(The hell of it is, about a quarter of the people I saw were wearing masks themselves. RINOs.)

[orange808]

If second infections without symptoms are due to mutations, it could be good news. Because, becoming less dangerous is a favorable mutation for a virus. It allows a virus to live in greater numbers and circulate more freely. Eventually, that's the path the virus will probably adopt. The sooner, the better.

[FinalBaton]

...so that younger stronger peeps can build immunity.

How does that work? You either get sick or you don't.

I think their line of thinking is : we're all gonna get in contact with this thing. So better not all get it at the same time.

By deconfining people by batch, this reduce the toll on the healthcare system. versus deconfining everyone at once and then you got everyone sick and hospitals are overwhelmed.

This hard confinement bit we had, was also in this thinking : it allowed us to deal with the old people in retirement homes and hospitals first. And just that slice of the population, was a hell of a drag on the system (which legit almost crumbled here...). Can you imagine if we had all age groups sick at the same time?

Now that the older peeps got hit and have been taken care of, they're rolling out another batch (the youngins'). We will see how it goes.


In Sweden they went hardcore deconfining everyone at the same time and early at that. Or so I read. Now in that case, I believe they'll tax their healtcare system too much (too many people sick at the same time). Which I'm skeptical about. But we'll see maybe it'll work out well for them. (maybe they were thinking ''getting dne with this earlier in the long-term''? IDK just trying to understand their thinking)

The thing is : nobody knows how to perfectly handle this health crisis. There is no perfect answer. I read an interview with a pandemics expert (world-reknowned doctor who devoted his life to studying them) and his answer to the question ''what's the best way to handle this pandemic'' was ''I don't know''...

[BulletMagnet]

We already know this stuff. They latch on to the Lysol-lacking proteins in our body.

It really has been quite a week here in the States, hasn't it.

Tempted as I am to launch an overdue tirade over how Trump and company are openly using the outbreak as an opportunity to not only crash "ungrateful" states' economies but deliver a killing blow to the Postal Service (but shhh, you're not allowed to call that "politicizing a crisis"), or just marvel yet again at how much of a pathetic pussy he is, but screw it, I'm just gonna link this amusing image I encountered on the Shmups Twitter and call it a day.

[ZacharyB]

If second infections without symptoms are due to mutations, it could be good news. Because, becoming less dangerous is a favorable mutation for a virus. It allows a virus to live in greater numbers and circulate more freely. Eventually, that's the path the virus will probably adopt. The sooner, the better.

It's true that a prosperous virus is usually a less deadly one. Viruses like Marburgvirus (fatality rate something like 80%) rarely spread very far... In the case of SARS-CoV2 (CoViD-19's virus), It could be good, but, it could also be bad. I read an article that there are currently 12 identified mutations of the virus. 2 are related to the spike proteins. If those mutate too much, a vaccine won't work on all strains of SARS-CoV2, leaving those strains that are immune to then become the dominant strains.

The reason things like Measles can have enduring vaccines is because of weak points in the virus's genes. Measles can't mutate too much around its own entry proteins or else the virus falls apart—it's just the way it's constructed. Because of this, a vaccine engineered 50 years ago is still effective today.

On the other end of the scale, you have Influenza, which is continually mutating, free of this flaw in Measles's genetic code. Because of that, we need new flu vaccines every year.

There's no way to tell which way a virus will mutate... Didn't the 1918 Influenza pandemic become deadlier on its second wave?

[Steamflogger Boss]

We already know this stuff. They latch on to the Lysol-lacking proteins in our body.

It really has been quite a week here in the States, hasn't it.

Tempted as I am to launch an overdue tirade over how Trump and company are openly using the outbreak as an opportunity to not only crash "ungrateful" states' economies but deliver a killing blow to the Postal Service (but shhh, you're not allowed to call that "politicizing a crisis"), or just marvel yet again at how much of a pathetic pussy he is, but screw it, I'm just gonna link this amusing image I encountered on the Shmups Twitter and call it a day.

Trump is such a clown, it's beyond parody. Amazon at this point uses their own couriers. This is such bs with the usps. It isn't without issues but I'd hate to see them go and the only options be private businesses in this late stage capitalism hellscape.

[vol.2]

Take that one with a pinch of salt for the moment.

Yeah, I've been getting way too wound up about it. I need to just stop looking at the numbers for awhile and give it a rest.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Take that one with a pinch of salt for the moment.

Yeah, I've been getting way too wound up about it. I need to just stop looking at the numbers for awhile and give it a rest.

It's all too easy to freak yourself out and fearmonger over this. I was at that point for a bit earlier and had to unplug.

[Udderdude]

Comparison of excess overall deaths vs. reported COVID-19 deaths shows the true death toll may be 60% higher than reported.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-338 ... 5c6fac846c

[vol.2]

Comparison of excess overall deaths vs. reported COVID-19 deaths shows the true death toll may be 60% higher than reported.

Could be even higher considering the timeline is now very uncertain. After they determined that woman in southern California died of Covid in february, they would have to go back and do autopsies on anyone who fit the symptoms in that pre-lockdown time. Which won't happen because no one has the time and how many were cremated? I suppose they will eventually fill in the gap with statistics, but it's early days for death tallies.

[BulletMagnet]

Now three meat plants in my area had to be shut down due to workers bringing it in and forced them to re-sanitize everything.

No worries, Daddy's taking care of it...if, by "taking care of" you mean "forcing to stay open". Naturally, it gets better, as the same executive order also decrees that any workers who get sick as a result are prohibited from suing; naturally Mitch, never to be outdone, has even grander plans to that effect (but remember: shhhh).

And of course that's only a sampling of our most recent highlights.

[FinalBaton]

Wow, pretty dire situation for municipal/state/federal workers. (in addition to tourism and restauration and businesses of course). And how will this affect education, sanitation, safety and health?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... BOCDYNpu70

[Blacksheep]

If you don't physically live in country, you shouldn't be chiming in on American politics.

Guess what dipshit, I’m an American citizen.

Even if he wasn't an American citizen, well, it's not an American forum, never has been

[orange808]

Meh. I never asserted it was an American forum.

Give up?

Retire?

Start training! Make a comeback!

[vol.2]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5BZ09iNdvo

i'm assuming everybody has seen the Lego animation that the Chinese government posted about the US response to the virus?