pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
Pope Frank really burns my buns. If it’s about overpopulation let Say Yes to the Dress guy have a nice chat about birth control
Pope Frank really burns my buns. If it’s about overpopulation let Say Yes to the Dress guy have a nice chat about birth control
nivek
As Above So Below
Disgusting...
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Chinese company charges American medical suppliers more than FOUR TIMES the normal price for medical masks as country profits off back of virus
A sales document from Wehere Medical in Hangzou, China, shows the company has been quoting suppliers $744 for a pack of 200 medical-grade masks, instead of $164.
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...
Chinese company charges American medical suppliers more than FOUR TIMES the normal price for medical masks as country profits off back of virus
A sales document from Wehere Medical in Hangzou, China, shows the company has been quoting suppliers $744 for a pack of 200 medical-grade masks, instead of $164.
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nivek
As Above So Below
There are THREE distinct strains of the novel coronavirus in the world and the virus 'may be mutating to thrive in different immune systems'
- Type A is closest to the one found in bats and pangolins and has two sub-clusters
- One sub-cluster has links to Wuhan and the other is found in the US and Australia
- Type B is derived from type A and is the dominant variation seen in Wuhan
- Type C is the 'daughter' of type B and was spread to Europe via Singapore
Shadowprophet
Truthiness
There are actually Four.
Coronavirus | Human Coronavirus Types | CDC
Human Coronavirus Types
Coronaviruses are named for the crown-like spikes on their surface. There are four main sub-groupings of coronaviruses, known as alpha, beta, gamma, and delta.
Human coronaviruses were first identified in the mid-1960s. The seven coronaviruses that can infect people are:
Common human coronaviruses
- 229E (alpha coronavirus)
- NL63 (alpha coronavirus)
- OC43 (beta coronavirus)
- HKU1 (beta coronavirus)
- MERS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS)
- SARS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS)
- SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)
Sometimes coronaviruses that infect animals can evolve and make people sick and become a new human coronavirus. Three recent examples of this are 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV.
No you're getting it all mixed up: the article was exclusively talking about the three identified strains of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and their sub-types. The "common human coronaviruses" have been around for years and have nothing to do with this pandemic.
Shadowprophet
Truthiness
I've never been one to shy away from being wrong,
My huge drawback on Coronovirus info is though, If it doesn't pass through the CDC, I don't validate it. From what I can tell The CDC isn't saying there are multiple strains of Sars Cov02
I'm not saying there isn't, It's just how can I trust it if it isn't CDC approved information?
Though, I would like more information on the different strains of the current Sars-cov 2 though, Is this why some people just get the sniffles and others die horribly? Because they caught different strains? Why would someone not be mixed up at this point?
The point I'm getting at is, Usatoday is claiming there are eight strains,
Coronavirus: How scientists are tracking 8 strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus
There is a lot of confusing information about this issue. How can we get concrete information on different stains?
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We just don't have the answers to those questions yet...it's so goddamn frustrating to deal with this pandemic because it happened so fast that the march of science is only now barely beginning to understand this virus, and it's a moving target because the more it spreads, the more it mutates.
The researchers are positing a hypothesis that some populations are more susceptible to one of the three variants, so yes maybe you're right that some people who get one strain will mount a better immune response to it, whereas the same person getting a different strain would get a worse case and more effectively spread it to others around them...leading to that strain profilerating faster in a given type of population. That seems like a reasonable model. On the other hand it may just be a matter of "first come, first serve" - if a bunch of travelers from Europe bring the B strain to the East coast and a bunch of other travelers bring the A strain over from China, then the B strain will spread more in the east and the A strain will spread in the west.
So yeah, we don't know yet. It'll probably be years before we really understand this virus and the body's immune response to it. And in the meantime it's worrisome to see these variants splitting off because that could foil our efforts to develop vaccines and treatments against it.
Shadowprophet
Truthiness
I know what you mean,
Everybody already knew I was prone to breakdowns, I'm a literal mess right now
Don't worry though. even if the only reason not to worry is worry does us no good brother
Everybody already knew I was prone to breakdowns, I'm a literal mess right now
Don't worry though. even if the only reason not to worry is worry does us no good brother
Most people with a brain are pretty tweaked out these days, because this is a giant shit sandwich of a predicament that's gripping the entire planet. So don't beat yourself up for coming a bit unglued: that only means that you're human.I know what you mean,
Everybody already knew I was prone to breakdowns, I'm a literal mess right now
Don't worry though. even if the only reason not to worry is worry does us no good brother
I think that some level of worry is a good thing right now: if you're worried then you're more likely to observe social distancing and to disinfect everything that you bring into the house etc. Worry is a survival mechanism.
And we should probably get used to it. Because while I'm seeing some reasons to hope for this to abate somewhat in the relative near term, the truth is that we don't have the infrastructure to mount a rapid biotech response to this problem so we're probably looking at a two-year or longer on-going threat with this thing. All these hopeful news articles and such are totally ignoring the fact that it would be a totally unprecedented medical miracle to have a vaccine or a cure for this virus within the next two years. All of us are hoping to see that happen, but frankly that's about 99 parts wishful thinking to 1 part reasonable projection.
Shadowprophet
Truthiness
I've even heard people claiming that the ways this will change businesses and the social distancing thing may change how society functions permanently, I mean, It just makes sense really, This pandemic isn't the only disease people will want to avoid from now on, In the longest stretch I feel sorry for the younger people who date. Can you imagine what a post-pandemic world will be like for people who want to date each other? with fears of diseases and with social distancing becoming the norm?
Nothing's permanent, so while it's reasonable to expect this to last 2-3 years, it's not going to last forever. Things will eventually return to "normal," probably once we have a vaccine and/or synthetic antibodies.
And you're right - I remember the horrible chilling effect of the AIDS epidemic...suddenly having sex could kill you. And although this is far less lethal than AIDS was back then, the prevalence of this thing and the fact that you can catch it just by talking to somebody too closely, spells for the worst dating conditions in over a century.
As far as other diseases, that's not going to mess with people's minds because we always see the new ones coming, so there's not much to worry about unless you're in the midst of a pandemic like this one. What we really need to do, as a global industrial community, is to finally start pouring significant funding into biotech. If we'd started doing that a few decades ago, we'd already have the capability to mount an effective response to a virus like this quickly - a few hundred billion in R&D would've saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented the Great Depression 2.0 that we're now sliding into.
nivek
As Above So Below
There's been more spikes in deaths for Thursday, especially France but also Germany, Belgium, and the UK have higher numbers of deaths...Spain and Italy seem to be counting between 600 to 700 deaths per day which isn't good...
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Coronavirus Update (Live): 1,603,719 Cases and 95,722 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Pandemic - Worldometer
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Coronavirus Update (Live): 1,603,719 Cases and 95,722 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Pandemic - Worldometer
What's happening in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy right now is what's about to happen in the US and hopefully in the UK soon as well - the number of active cases is flattening out as the daily death toll spikes, because the number of active cases is a leading indicator and the daily deaths are a trailing indicator. So the good news is that the daily deaths will also start to level out in a few days to a week. This is the darkness before the first light of dawn.
France:
Germany:
Belgium:
Spain:
Italy:
Even in the UK and US charts the fact that the rise is linear, rather than asymptotic, indicates that the countermeasures are impeding the growth rate of the virus. But it's a lot easier to see on my graphs because the growth rate is explicitly extracted from the data and magnified by summing 8 days instead of one to calculate the numerator in the quotient. Anyway, here are the raw numbers graphed out:
UK:
US:
nivek
As Above So Below
Italy sees number of new coronavirus deaths rise and infections tally increase by more than 4,000 for the first time in four days, lowering hopes the illness is in retreat
Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy rose by 610 on Thursday, up from 542 the day before, and the number of new cases also came in higher at 4,204 from a previous 3,836.
The daily tally of cases was the highest since April 5, and comes as a disappointment to a country in lockdown since March 9, anxious for clear signs that the illness is in retreat.
The total death toll since the outbreak came to light rose to 18,279, the Civil Protection Agency said, the highest in the world. The number of confirmed cases climbed to 143,626, the third highest global tally behind those of the United States and Spain.
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Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy rose by 610 on Thursday, up from 542 the day before, and the number of new cases also came in higher at 4,204 from a previous 3,836.
The daily tally of cases was the highest since April 5, and comes as a disappointment to a country in lockdown since March 9, anxious for clear signs that the illness is in retreat.
The total death toll since the outbreak came to light rose to 18,279, the Civil Protection Agency said, the highest in the world. The number of confirmed cases climbed to 143,626, the third highest global tally behind those of the United States and Spain.
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nivek
As Above So Below
I'd like to add a note to that, the Federal government has not shut down a single business, President Trump has not shut down a single business in America, the State Governors have done this...Of course these actions are saving lives but many of those lives will be lost later if we do not develop a sure fire vaccine because all the people that are allegedly staying at home are still vulnerable...They have no immunity to it, in a round about sort of way we are possibly setting the stage for a second wave and if a second wave is anything close to this first wave we will most certainly without doubt see another Great Depression...As you said though, we may already be sliding into the Great Depression 2.0, so many of the lives saved from Covid-19, as a result of shutting down businesses, may be ruined financially due to the course of actions of our State Governors...
I mentioned in a earlier thread that I wondered if people who received plasma from a donor in order to recover from Covid-19 continued to have a good percentage of antibodies to remain immune from reinfection because it may be the short term answer to giving other people an immunity...Donated plasma from recovered people given to those who haven't had Covid-19 yet may help them become immune if the antibody count remains stable enough, it may be a shot in the dark though, it may or may not work...
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I guess we should thank the governors for showing the leadership to save lives during a deadly global pandemic, then, because if people were still working in close quarters indoors then this virus would have exactly what it needs to grow throughout our population exponentially and completely overwhelm our hospitals until people were dying in the streets waiting for a hospital bed. That's where we'd be right now if people weren't staying at home.
It seems weird to me that we're in the midst of a global war with this virus, and instead of mounting a federal response, the states are left to fight the battle. Imagine how badly WWII would've gone if we'd left it up to each state to wage their own war on the Nazis.
I'm unclear on how you think we're setting the stage for a second wave. As long as we're self-quarantined, there can't be a second wave - that only happens when people jump back into their old lives while a highly contagious virus is still moving among the population.
That's why I see a >95% likelihood that this is just the beginning of the Great Depression 2.0. We can't restart the economy unless we have an effective new treatment, or we'll trigger another wave just like this one. So we're check-mated. As bad as the economic metrics are right now...about one month into the countermeasures, try to imagine how bad they'll be after 18-24 months of this nightmare. It looks to me like we'll be calling this one the Great Depression, and renaming the last one the Lesser Depression, because a complete long-term shutdown of the global economy during a pandemic is far more catastrophic than a stock market crash.
Sure but I think that given the choice between "financial ruination" and "slowly drowning to death in your own blood plasma over a couple of weeks alone and terrified and intubated in a crowded ICU," most people would opt for the former over the latter. So I don't understand why you're casting shade on the state governors: you chose to self-isolate to spare yourself from exposure to this virus....why should anyone in their right mind do any differently? Let me put it this way: how do you think we should be dealing with this pandemic differently?
I've been clear as a bell on my position about this: we should've locked down the entire country and deployed the national guard to all of our major cities to make sure that anybody on the road is either getting provisions or getting medical attention. If we'd done this before the virus had flooded throughout our country, then we could've stomped this out entirely within a few weeks, and we'd be going back to work soon. The failure of centralized leadership and this half-assed pussy-footing around with this thing is why we're all now dealing with the worst-case scenario: a total infestation of the entire country that's now impossible to contain so the economy will remain at more or less of a dead stop for many months...not mere weeks.
That's why I'm angry - it didn't have to play out like this. But literally every bogus "leader" in this country failed us - they all waited until it was too late because they have no foresight and/or zero concern for the lives of our people. Otherwise, they would've rung the alarm when they got the intelligence assessments predicting calamity in early January, and by many accounts even earlier than that: our intelligence people saw this coming, but every single official chose to minimize the situation instead of taking it head on, because they're all stupid, feckless cowards.
There's good news and bad news on that front. The good news: they're already doing this and it definitely helps. The bad news: the human antibody production rate is fairly modest and about 30% of recovered patients have little if any detectable antibodies. This is not yet well-understood, like all of the really important questions about this virus...
Scientists Raised Question on Coronavirus Reinfectiion Risk as Recovered Patients Show Surprisingly Low Antibody Levels
And the other thing is - at this rate of growth and the slow rate of patient recovery, there are far more patients who need the antibodies than there are donors to supply them. So they're reserving the harvested antibody plasma for the most severe ICU patients, which doesn't help much with the overall outlook.
Anyway - I know I sound irate in this post, but I'm not irate with you, I'm irate with the situation and the jagoffs who got us into this situation. Because now there's no way out, only a way through. For most of us anyway.
AD1184
Celestial
As Thomas mentioned earlier, consistency in reporting, rather than completeness, is what is important to determine a trend. You have to do quite a lot of detective work to determine that the metrics you are using are based on consistent data gathering. Many national case reporting programmes are not consistent.
I think that many countries are expanding their testing capacity and this could include Italy. I do not know exactly what is going on in Italy, but if, for example, their data gathering to date was dominated by hospital admissions, and they have suddenly expanded their community testing capacity, then there might be an increase in the number of confirmed cases all of a sudden without a true rise in the rate of new infections.
AD1184
Celestial
There is an interesting story by Reuters on the British response to Covid-19 that has been making some waves here, including comments from people involved in the goings-on behind the scenes.
Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm
Since the start of this pandemic, I have had concerns about the quality of scientific advice that the government has chosen to adhere to. It is very well to point out the qualifications and prestige of those giving it, but when that advice contradicts common sense, and there are also a multitude of other experts outside the narrow pool which holds the ear of government whose advice seems very much more sensible, then you cannot help but have misgivings. Our leaders ought to have had the same misgivings.
Quite possibly they did. I think Boris Johnson hid rather cowardly behind his advisors, being flanked by them at every press conference, so as to set them up to take the fall when it all went wrong. The fact that a flu pandemic response plan was allowed to be used as a blueprint for the response to this disease is also a scandal. The flu response plan makes a number of questionable assumptions, and a couple that become flat-out wrong when it comes to a coronavirus pandemic. The first being that a vaccine could be developed in four to six months' time after the date of order. Possibly true for a new flu strain, but definitely not for a coronavirus.
Secondly, that there are effective antiviral medicines ready-to-use to treat the disease. Again, true for the flu, but not for coronavirus. There may be existing medicines that are effective against Covid-19, but their efficacy is currently unproven, and it takes vital time for efficacy trials to be undertaken. There are currently no approved antiviral treatments for Covid-19.
Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm
Since the start of this pandemic, I have had concerns about the quality of scientific advice that the government has chosen to adhere to. It is very well to point out the qualifications and prestige of those giving it, but when that advice contradicts common sense, and there are also a multitude of other experts outside the narrow pool which holds the ear of government whose advice seems very much more sensible, then you cannot help but have misgivings. Our leaders ought to have had the same misgivings.
Quite possibly they did. I think Boris Johnson hid rather cowardly behind his advisors, being flanked by them at every press conference, so as to set them up to take the fall when it all went wrong. The fact that a flu pandemic response plan was allowed to be used as a blueprint for the response to this disease is also a scandal. The flu response plan makes a number of questionable assumptions, and a couple that become flat-out wrong when it comes to a coronavirus pandemic. The first being that a vaccine could be developed in four to six months' time after the date of order. Possibly true for a new flu strain, but definitely not for a coronavirus.
Secondly, that there are effective antiviral medicines ready-to-use to treat the disease. Again, true for the flu, but not for coronavirus. There may be existing medicines that are effective against Covid-19, but their efficacy is currently unproven, and it takes vital time for efficacy trials to be undertaken. There are currently no approved antiviral treatments for Covid-19.
pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
Sorry, but no way that could possibly work here. Totalitarian China maybe but here if you want civil unrest of epic proportions that's the way to get it.