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On January 22 2021 21:59 RKC wrote:
A few Asian countries have pulled off #2 well. Partly due the collective culture, and mental fortitude to accept the new norm (whatever it is). They don't see #2 as a temporary hindrance or a 'deal' that will bring everything back to normal like before. They may not like #2, but they can live with #2 for years or even the rest of their lives if need be. They don't have lofty aspiritations that everything will work out the end. They don't get mad if their leaders make a boo-boo. They're calm, they're patient. Live the moment. There's no day but today. That's how they make #2 work.
Which counties, exactly?
China, Australia and NZ are the poster children for #1, although in very different ways.
SK, Japan and Thailand managed #2 for an impressively long time, but are now crashing into #3. Thailand might squeak through without a lockdown.
Vietnam is #1. They went hard at the start and have been very strict regionally. On the whole they seem to have used China's approach sans the terrifying security state. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-23/how-did-vietnam-get-on-top-of-coronavirus-yet-again/12683008
I guess Taiwan and Singapore? Two tiny islands are a pretty small sample size.
I agree that talking about the UK variant is inconsistent with the WHO's desperation to avoid "Wuhan virus". Once again you can thank China's focus on managing the optics rather than the outbreak at the beginning. The UK hasn't really bothered managing either.
+ Show Spoiler +Categories, for reference : On January 22 2021 19:59 Amui wrote:Show nested quote +On January 22 2021 19:37 Gorsameth wrote:On January 22 2021 19:27 warding wrote:On January 22 2021 18:40 Slydie wrote:
Spain also had another day with 44k new cases (almost 0,1% of the population), and the hospitals are being strained already. The holidays are the obvious smoking gun, even though the restrictions were only slightly lifted for a short time.
I posted a week or so ago about the situation in Portugal with cases rising fast. Turns out they did not stop rising. Portugal is now the country in the world with the most confirmed cases per million (7 day rolling avg) with 1083 cases per million. Second is Andorra with 944 and then Israel at 875 and Spain at 747. UK is at 597 and US is at 566. The EU average is at 300. We now also lead in confirmed deaths, with 18.24 per million, with the UK coming a close second with 18.1. EU average is 7.36. Schools were only closed today and we've been in a 'lockdown' for a week. The government has avoided strict lockdowns because the country can't afford it. The situation is dire. Hospitals are reaching capacity and the number of ICU patients keep rising every day. Doctors are already picking those who might have bigger chances of living. Sequencing data was shared a couple of days ago and it seems the UK variant is already 20% of cases, rising from 10% a week before. Vaccines are not going to save us in the short term. The situation is horrifying and it will only get worse in the next 15-20 days.  As I believe I told you a week ago, it will take 2 weeks to show the effects of a new measure on cases, ~3 weeks to see it on hospital admissions and 4 weeks for deaths. What your seeing today has little to do with what you did a week ago, but is from 2 weeks ago. It will be another week of rising cases before you see the measures of the lockdown from last week. Yeah that's the super scary part about Covid. So many people can't see a week ahead, let alone a month ahead. It's hard to get people on board with harsher measures when everything looks fine from their perspective. The science, modeling and timescale behind Covid is pretty well known at this point. If it looks like cases are rising, it is much, much better to err on the side of caution and make everybody feel like the reaction was heavy-handed than to allow another 2 weeks for insufficient measures to take effect, and then implement additional measures that don't have an impact until a month later. The virus spreads more easily as more people get infected as well because it gets harder and harder for track and trace and isolation protocols to catch everybody as numbers go up. It takes one super spreader event to cause disaster. A proper reaction from a governmental perspective is going to look like an overreaction to the average citizen. I know people like to complain about their freedoms and masks and so on, but quite frankly there have been only a few approaches in the world(albeit with different severity levels). I've ranked them in order of effectiveness. 1. Cases to near zero, aggressive quarantine/isolation protocols. People in these places can almost live their lives as normal now. 2. Cases at low, stable, non-zero number. Very, very few examples of this working globally. You need populace buy-in, and very targeted measures(pick and choose) and long term r0 of ~.9 to 0.95 to make this work, because otherwise holidays will fuck you up. Most industries have stayed open and people are still working for the most part. Limited social contact at all times. Rate of change is slow, so timing to implement or remove measures is not as critical. I don't think this will work at all with UK strain, until widespread vaccination/immunity. 3. Cycle between lockdowns, and periods of moderate openness. If you fuck up timings on measures and lockdowns, a lot of people get Covid. Industries that can't survive repeated closure due to lockdowns die. If UK strain has spread significantly, expect cycles between lockdown and heavy measures. I haven't seen anything short of full lockdown be effective against it. 4. Do nothing more than maybe mask mandate and let it burn out. A lot of people die. Not a good option, but has happened in many poor countries by necessity.
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On January 23 2021 06:33 Belisarius wrote:
I agree that talking about the UK variant is inconsistent with the WHO's desperation to avoid "Wuhan virus". Once again you can thank China's focus on managing the optics rather than the outbreak at the beginning. The UK hasn't really bothered managing either.
The media here isn't calling it the UK variant are they though? It's the UK MUTANT STRAIN.
EU member states are now starting to import vaccines themselves as they believe the EU rollout has been too slow and inefficient.Hungarys Orban is looking into importing several million doses of the Chinese vaccine.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-15/orban-pressures-hungarian-regulator-to-decide-on-chinese-vaccine?sref=ZMFHsM5Z
Orban Pressures Hungarian Regulator to Decide on Chinese Vaccine
Hungary’s prime minister piled pressure on the national health authority to decide on approving Covid-19 vaccines from China, saying western versions negotiated by the European Union were too slow to arrive.
Viktor Orban is treading a fine line as he seeks to boost vaccinations without raising already alarming rates of vaccine skepticism in Hungary. He was an early supporter of Russia’s vaccine and he initially said people wouldn’t be told which doses they would be getting. He has since said citizens would be informed.
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You guys think we'll be able to travel to the US in june?
I know we can't know definitely but if we were to guess
(Thanks for the answers)
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On January 24 2021 01:38 JimmiC wrote:
What else should they call them, there is now the UK strain, California strain and South Africa strain. It is not offensive because no one is blaming those places for it, nor are they trying to down play its seriousness like with the Kung flu, Wuhan flu names.
It also has to do with recognition for the public, it is not harder for the public to learn covid-19 or just covid than Wuhan flu.
Where as covid-19 b.1.1.7 or covid-1920I/501Y.V1 is kinda hard to remember especially when there is also covid-19 1.351 and covid-19 L452r and others
And yes those are the technical names.
Denmark actually destroyed their fur industry partly for that reason, they did NOT want a mutation to be called the Danish mink mutation. I am not arguing if it was correct or not.
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On January 24 2021 04:43 Nebuchad wrote:
You guys think we'll be able to travel to the US in june?
I know we can't know definitely but if we were to guess
You can already travel to the us i think if it is for work?
For pleasure probably yes though you will need a negative test. Things will open up as soon as there is even a little room to do so as the past 9 months have shown. And cases will probably start to drop a bit during the spring.
I dont think there is any reason to book in advance though,even if tourism increases it will be far from the normal volume and their should be ample capacity.
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On January 24 2021 01:38 JimmiC wrote:
What else should they call them, there is now the UK strain, California strain and South Africa strain. It is not offensive because no one is blaming those places for it, nor are they trying to down play its seriousness like with the Kung flu, Wuhan flu names.
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I'd rather see the media here refer to it as the UK strain or UK variant rather than the UK Mutant strain.The place being in it has nothing to do with it.
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ive literally never seen a news article in australia call it the "uk mutant strain". its either been just "uk strain" or "uk variant"
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One of the greatest beneficiaries from the lockdowns, Amazons Jeff Bezos is now claiming a ~3% COVID positive rate in it's Alabama facility does not classify as an outbreak.This is all down to him wanting a union vote to be held in person rather than by mail.Amazon is also pushing that mail-in voting is 'imperfect' (could lead to vote fraud).
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/22/tech/amazon-nlrb-union-election/index.html
In filings this week, however, Amazon said the NLRB decision regarding its election doesn't specify what is considered an "outbreak." Amazon said the NLRB's Acting Regional Director, Lisa Henderson, "reached the remarkable conclusion that any level of infection or potential infection among employees counts as an 'outbreak.'"
Amazon said that at its Bessemer facility, 2.88% of Amazon's 7,575 employees and third-party workers at the facility -- or 218 people -- tested positive during the 14-day period ending on January 7. Amazon rejected the idea that this would be considered an outbreak.
"If true, facilities will be in a constant state of 'outbreak' unless and until the virus all but disappears, with no manual elections occurring until that unknown time," the filing read, also citing that a mail election could "disenfranchise dozens or hundreds of voters" because it is imperfect.
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Anti covid-19 restrictions demonstrations in Copenhagen yesterday, which included arrests, throwing bottles at the police and burning a doll of the prime minister stating "she must be euthanized".
The fear of the UK-strain is spreading in Norway, as Oslo is closing down. They are taking it extremely seriously, even though the number of new infections in Norway is very low in an European context. The new strain seems much more contagious, and might be more deadly as well.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/9-arrested-at-coronavirus-protests-in-denmark/2104600#
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Norway28913 Posts
On January 24 2021 18:19 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:One of the greatest beneficiaries from the lockdowns, Amazons Jeff Bezos is now claiming a ~3% COVID positive rate in it's Alabama facility does not classify as an outbreak.This is all down to him wanting a union vote to be held in person rather than by mail.Amazon is also pushing that mail-in voting is 'imperfect' (could lead to vote fraud). https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/22/tech/amazon-nlrb-union-election/index.htmlShow nested quote +
In filings this week, however, Amazon said the NLRB decision regarding its election doesn't specify what is considered an "outbreak." Amazon said the NLRB's Acting Regional Director, Lisa Henderson, "reached the remarkable conclusion that any level of infection or potential infection among employees counts as an 'outbreak.'"
Amazon said that at its Bessemer facility, 2.88% of Amazon's 7,575 employees and third-party workers at the facility -- or 218 people -- tested positive during the 14-day period ending on January 7. Amazon rejected the idea that this would be considered an outbreak.
"If true, facilities will be in a constant state of 'outbreak' unless and until the virus all but disappears, with no manual elections occurring until that unknown time," the filing read, also citing that a mail election could "disenfranchise dozens or hundreds of voters" because it is imperfect.
Did you seriously read, and bolden, 'could disenfranchise voters' for then to summarize it as 'could lead to vote fraud'?
I mean, I think amazon isn't being legitimate (I'm guessing they want in-person non-anonymous voting because they want people to be afraid of voting for unionizing or whatever it is) - but this is silly. (Just to be clear - this is an attempt at some sort of legitimizing 'mail in votes are likely to be fraudulent - just look at the american election'- type of argument, just casually thrown into the covid discussion. )
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On January 24 2021 14:46 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2021 01:38 JimmiC wrote:
What else should they call them, there is now the UK strain, California strain and South Africa strain. It is not offensive because no one is blaming those places for it, nor are they trying to down play its seriousness like with the Kung flu, Wuhan flu names.
. I'd rather see the media here refer to it as the UK strain or UK variant rather than the UK Mutant strain.The place being in it has nothing to do with it.
Wait, what exactly is the problem?
It is a mutant variant of sars-cov-2. That is literally the technical definition. It has mutated, therefore it is a mutant.
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There is some sort of online vaccine calculator and with the rate vaccination is going I might get my first dose at the end of this year... lol
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On January 24 2021 20:22 Belisarius wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2021 14:46 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:On January 24 2021 01:38 JimmiC wrote:
What else should they call them, there is now the UK strain, California strain and South Africa strain. It is not offensive because no one is blaming those places for it, nor are they trying to down play its seriousness like with the Kung flu, Wuhan flu names.
. I'd rather see the media here refer to it as the UK strain or UK variant rather than the UK Mutant strain.The place being in it has nothing to do with it. Wait, what exactly is the problem? It is a mutant variant of sars-cov-2. That is literally the technical definition. It has mutated, therefore it is a mutant.
The Chinese variant is almost certainly also a mutant variant, that's why it's strange to call the UK variant a "mutant variant".
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It's not strange to me. We have a mutation that became important to us for the reasons we all know.
That's the OG variant. Everything before that is nonexistent. Hence every deviation from the OG is a mutation and the OG is the OG.
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Everything is a mutant of something else. But the word mutant does lead people to think about fish with three eyes and stuff like that, or scary monsters.
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EPT
