Harbinger wrote:My brother is a pulmonologist. He has treated dozens and dozens of patients with corona. He was pretty blunt about it. He said, “It’s hard on fat diabetics.”
We knew this 6 months ago but Democrats wanted to shut everything down, anyway, because it was the only weapon they had at the time against Trump--he had recently been exonerated over impeachment, the economy was in great shape, and there were 20 hopefuls looking for the Democrat nomination.
I don't want to think about the phrase "middle-aged". Na na na na I'm not listening.
How about all those people who gathered together in non-socially-distant meetings to be upset over Ginsberg's death? Look for some moderate spikes in another week or two.
Incidentally, I work in a grocery store and have done so since corona became a thing. Even with all the random people coming in the store on a daily basis not a single employee has contracted it--either several dozen people are all simply lucky or it isn't that contagious. Some of my coworkers there are also older than I am and/or have comorbid conditions, placing them in high-risk groups....and they still haven't contracted it, either, even after 6 months.
Last night our PM told us that although we were previously winning the fight, were getting a hold on Covid (when sixty five million people were confined to their houses for twelve weeks), as a result of to many 'breaches' - in other words because people released from confinement wanted to do the normal human thing of being together, of holding and touching each other, of feeling the common bond of humanity that comes from simply being in the close proximity of other people, be it on the beach, in the pub or in the towns - because of this, we were back in the fire again.
This was, he told us, a fight humanity could win, indeed were winning until we took our foot off the brakes. We would he said, get back on top of the thing by the imposition of a strict new set of life-rules, backed up by Draconian fines, the police and the army (with the threat of ever greater restrictions to our freedoms if we failed to comply) which would stay in situ for six months at least. As the Daily Mail told us "he gave us both barrels".
Well, this might be all to the good if there was any truth in it, but in reality it's fantasy stuff. Of course the transmission rate fell with human contact reduced to zilch in the country - and of course it went straight back up as soon as the strictures placed on it were relaxed. This was not "defeating the virus" - we were not "winning the war"; these were fluctuations in the transmission rate that were entirely predictable given the different conditions pertaining to the possibility for transmission and the same will be true now. No matter how many times or ways in which you shut people down, the virus will utilize those conduits that remain for its transmission. It is only when the last person, with the last sniffle is sealed alone in a cupboard - and stays there until they die or get better - that (without an effective and safe vaccine) the virus will be 'defeated' in this way. That there is absolutely no guarantee that a safe and effective vaccine can be developed in a short time frame - or indeed at all - is something that should be absolutely borne in mind in the imposition of the kind of limitations that Johnson has now placed on us, for what must effectively be the foreseeable future (six months being the arbitrary figure that it has been decided that the public will accept, but after which the 'new normal' will be so entrenched that it can be continued ad infinitum at the Government's pleasure).
I don't even want to go into what the effects of this regime are going to be on us, either economically or socially if maintained over an extended period - in fact I can't; it is such an unnatural way of existence, so against everything that the human condition crys out for (if you think not, imagine your own period of youthful adolescence and twenties spent under an army enforced mask wearing legislation and never being able to gather in a group of greater than six) that the long-term effects of such an existence are barely comprehensible. And the point is I don't have to (go into it, that is) - because sooner or later at some point, people are going to get that this isn't going to work. A guy on my local news stopped by a reporter said "I can't meet more than six people but my kids go to school every day and mix with fourteen hundred other kids - I don't need to say anymore than that", and he walked away. He gets it - he gets the point; if you stop people meeting socially the bug simply spreads in the ways that remain open to it, via the offices and schools, the trains and buses, the shops and eateries. It's like water - it finds its route. Johnson's measures will slow it down for sure - but they won't, they can't eradicate it. And if our NHS, our Nightingale hospitals, our PPE and our ventilators are all in place (as he claims), if our 'new' treatments ('developed' in this country) are bang up to the mark as promised - then what purpose other than to damage our economy, to damage our society, to damage our people are these measures intended to bring about that take us closer to the place from which we can resume our normal lives.
People are going to die in the course of this. Absence the development of a safe, effective vaccine (which will likely take years if it is achieved at all) it is moot to decide whether to string the deaths out or to accept them in more concentrated numbers. While the first seems more palatable it has the side effect of economic destruction which of itself causes an increased subsequent mortality cost in other areas pertinent to the increase in social deprivation that such economic decline results in. If you "let the virus rip" (as Johnson put it last night) you get a concentration of the Covid deaths and the increase in mortality as a result of other conditions going unrecognised or untreated due to either over stretching of the available health resources or failure of people to present. It's Hobson's choice; hung if you do, hung if you don't. Which makes all of the societal damage, all of the mental stress of the enforcement of this Draconian regime of living upon people, who naturally rebel against such constraints, absolutely unnecessary and counterproductive.
It is rare that you will find me and Nigel Farage agreeing on anything, but on this issue we are one hundred percent in concert; this alone should give pause for thought. Needless to say, I will abide by the instructions given by my Government - I am not so far out on a limb that I have entirely eschewed the responsibility of adherence to the social contract which I buy into - but I will not like it. And I predict that as increasing numbers of people begin to question the efficacy and desirability of such a regime it will become increasingly difficult to enforce, leading inexorably toward the Government either going head to head with the populace and resorting to ever more restrictive and punitive measures in order to do so, or a climb down to something closer to the position of treatment and selective focus in tackling the virus which I would advocate. Time will tell.
(Edit; a key point I neglected to make above - thanks to Mrs P for observing it - that makes Johnson's presentation all the more insulting.......WE - DID - WHAT - WE - WERE -TOLD!
Were we not exhorted by the very Government that now has the fault resting with us to go out and fill our boots. Hell, they even paid us to do it. Get out and spend; eat drink and be merry, in order to get the economy up on it's feet again was the message of the day - and now it's our fault. Bastards!)
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.
....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'
What surprised me about BoZo's rhetoric last night was his arrant dismissal of the notion that everyone should go about their daily lives largely as normal (with things like working from home if possible etc etc) - except for the elderly or those with co-morbidities, who should self-isolate for their own safety if they want to.
I mean, brutal though it may be, isn't that now clearly the only logical strategy to adopt?
Newsflash: the word "irony" doesn't mean "a bit like iron"
Shockingly, some people have claimed that I'm egocentric... but hey, enough about them
"If you strike me down, I shall become far stronger than you can possibly imagine." _______________________________________________ I occasionally post things here because I am invariably correct on all matters, a thing which is educational for others less fortunate.
No one forgets about the coronavirus except Trump, who said that 200,000+ American deaths due to COVID is "virtually nothing."
Despite losing his shit when 2 people died of ebola under Obama's term.
You can be rest assured that despite Ginsburg getting a lot of press at the moment, no one has forgotten about Trump's criminal negligence regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
ur-Nanothnir wrote:no one has forgotten about Trump's criminal negligence regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then perhaps the House should impeach him. I am uncertain what law or Article of the Constitution they would cite as the impeachable offense but they might want to hurry--the election is coming up soon.
If they aren't going to impeach him then he did not do anything "criminal". The response was the responsbility of State Governors, not the POTUS.
The only thing we knew for certain in March was that corona was not deadly except to those who are elderly or have an underlying medical condition. In the last 6 months that has not changed. Since it isn't all that bad, time to end the remaining lockdowns and get back to business.
Well that's not entirely true. The virus is deadly to young, healthy people as well. Even Trump admitted in private (to Woodward, which you can hear in the leaked audio) that he knew it affected young people, too, and downplayed this aspect so as to "not cause panic."
I remember hearing several cases of healthy children (not infants or anything, just young kids) dying from COVID, young athletic people dying from COVID, healthy physicians working on COVID patients contracting the disease and dying, etc.
A disease that can have up to a 20% fatality rate is pretty serious. Look at Johns Hopkins COVID data in Mexico and you can see that they have multiple provinces where the case fatality rate is 15-20%. Even in wealthy Western countries in Europe, we were seeing 10-15% case fatality rate. It seems that the fatality rate is strongly linked to access to medical care. If hospitals are saturated with COVID patients, like we saw in New York, the case fatality rate skyrockets. This is a disease that will fuck you up if you get a clinically significant case and don't get the proper medical care.
Any disease will randomly kill people here and there and localized mortality rates are unfortunate yet irrelevant--the overall moratlity rate of corona is very low, therefore the disease is in general not that deadly.
Incidentally, have you been to the parts of Mexico where the mortality rate is high? The northern part of Mexico is under cartel control and the cartels don't spend much money on things like public sanitation so those areas are dirty, contributing to the spread of not just this disease but other diseases there. Some of those immigrants sneaking across the border have brought back diseases we had eradicated here--but that is another thread. Mexico City, itself, is highly congested and dirty like other cities such as San Francisco or New York, thus explaining their increased incidence of corona.
As I h ave noted, several dozen people work in the grocery store where I have been since before corona hit over here. Even with all those thousands of people coming in and out all the time, some elderly, some with medical conditions, all of them in varying states of health, and yet not a single person at the store has contracted corona in the last 6 months? How nice to know that all of us are that lucky! We should buy lottery tickets or hit the casino.
Bloody chaos! To say that this lot couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery would be to credit them with way to much ability. Most of them could not even say the phrase let alone write or read it!
We have got students by the thousand shipped of to university only to be placed into virtual imprisonment in their halls of residence as soon as they got there. Without proper arrangements for food provision and washing of clothes etc, the poor buggers have found themselves incarcerated with hundreds of virtual strangers for God knows how long, and warned (in some cases) that if they do the perfectly reasonable thing and cut for home they risk being thrown off their courses. Due to the 'rule of six' regulations that the country is under it is by no means clear that they will even be allowed home for Christmas, since their halls of residence constitute the one 'household' with whom they are allowed to mix.
Meanwhile the new NHS track-and-trace app, launched with a fanfare on Friday and for which a weekend public advertising campaign to encourage uptake is in process, has dissolved into ignominious failure on day two when it transpires that people who test positive can't enter that they have done so onto the app, and those who test negative aren't given a code to allow the fact that they are clear to be logged (and hence recieve continuous demands that they self isolate immediately). It's a right royal fuck-up from start to finish. No doubt those who are clear but can't log the fact will find themselves subject to the ten grand fine if they don't isolate to stop themselves from spreading the disease that they don't have!
Nice one Boris - working at full kilter as always. Never mind - you can have a crack at sorting out Brexit in a few weeks time. Perhaps that will go better.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.
....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'
Newsflash: the word "irony" doesn't mean "a bit like iron"
Shockingly, some people have claimed that I'm egocentric... but hey, enough about them
"If you strike me down, I shall become far stronger than you can possibly imagine." _______________________________________________ I occasionally post things here because I am invariably correct on all matters, a thing which is educational for others less fortunate.
man bad.
