Coronavirus: Continuing Vigilance

[Guard Dog]

Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer

 

Really? Quod erat demonstrandum

[Skarpen]

2 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer

 

Really? Quod erat demonstrandum

Dumb media paints a guy who commited suicide as some crazy idiot who took a leathal chemical because it contained something that is used in coronavirus treatment and you believe this crap? Come on, man you are better than this.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer

 

Really? Quod erat demonstrandum

My initial reaction was "lmao", but then I actually read the article and instead got sad. The poor man had no part in the decision to drink it besides the fact that he continued to love and trust his psychotic wife, and the wife killed him in return by giving it to him without telling him (and mixed it into soda to hide its presence).

Edited April 25, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[HoonDing]

this dude will get re-elected lmao

[Guard Dog]

1 hour ago, HoonDing said:

this dude will get re-elected lmao

It doesn't matter. Trump, Biden... would you rather French kiss a cobra or bitch slap  grizzly bear? The outcome is the same.

[Bartimaeus]

You can beat that same old drum all you want, but it's never rang more false than right now with the malevolent, two-bit lunatic we have. Biden is unlikely to be a good (...or comprehensible) president or leader, but I will gladly take "not good" over the malicious madness we've been experiencing.

And I say that as someone who strongly believed in and supported a much more moral and intelligent man, and as someone who convinced a number of friends and family members (including some lifelong conservatives) to vote for him in a stupid, useless primary.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[213374U]

On 4/20/2020 at 4:32 PM, Hurlshot said:

I wish they'd post more about the number of smokers who are heavily affected by the virus. They are quick to mention pre-existing health conditions, but it would be interesting to see what percentages of people that encountered serious problems were also vaping and smoking. I mean, lung health is a pretty big part of this whole thing. I hope those who do regularly breathe bad crap into their lungs are at least thinking twice about it now.  

Early days, so as with everything else regarding the pandemic, you should take this with a grain of salt. But counterintuitive as it is, thus far smoking seems to be, at worst, a non-factor and at best smokers are strongly underrepresented in COVID-19 cases.

https://www.qeios.com/read/review/186

https://www.ejinme.com/article/S0953-6205(20)30110-2/fulltext

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3566160

And yes, as you said, this seems to have been a wake up call for many smokers, who are thinking of or have already quit. The difference with the other knee-jerk reactions we've seen is that quitting smoking is probably a good idea, notwithstanding COVID-19.

[Guard Dog]

38 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

You can beat that same old drum all you want, but it's never rang more false than right now with the malevolent, two-bit lunatic we have. Biden is unlikely to be a good (...or comprehensible) president or leader, but I will gladly take "not good" over the malicious madness we've been experiencing.

And I say that as someone who strongly believed in and supported a much more moral and intelligent man, and as someone who convinced a number of friends and family members (including some lifelong conservatives) to vote for him in a stupid, useless primary.

I admire the fact that you still believe in something. That you can still summon up even a modicum of passion. Even though you know the cause is undeserving of it. I hope you never lose that because you will miss it once it's gone. Take it from one who knows.

[algroth]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

You can beat that same old drum all you want, but it's never rang more false than right now with the malevolent, two-bit lunatic we have. Biden is unlikely to be a good (...or comprehensible) president or leader, but I will gladly take "not good" over the malicious madness we've been experiencing.

And I say that as someone who strongly believed in and supported a much more moral and intelligent man, and as someone who convinced a number of friends and family members (including some lifelong conservatives) to vote for him in a stupid, useless primary.

This. This false equivalence argument needs to stop.

[Bartimaeus]

3 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

I admire the fact that you still believe in something. That you can still summon up even a modicum of passion. Even though you know the cause is undeserving of it. I hope you never lose that because you will miss it once it's gone. Take it from one who knows.

I do not like the Democratic Party, and I especially dislike Biden as its apparent leader. There are absolutely ways in which the Democratic Party is very similar to the Republican Party, both in methods and ideology, which make it understandably all-too-discouraging to support. However, since Trump was elected, there has been a surge of younger, more ideological representatives who I think, though perhaps flawed in other ways, are the future in bringing this party forward and away from current reality that is the heinous corporatecrat wing of the party, which currently makes up the majority and which relies way too heavily upon stupid and simplistic views of complicated wedge issues like gun control to get votes. Encouraging growth of this new wing of the party is about the only way I can oppose the corporatecrats and not surrender power (...and sanity) hand over fist to what, to my eyes, appears to be a now neo-fascist Republican Party. Defeating this new manifestation of the Republican Party is also probably the only way to bring it back to the realm of reality - winning has certainly only seemed to embolden and grow it from what I can tell. The Democratic Party is many things, but I do not believe it to widely be its own brand of fascist...yet. From the weekly to daily scandals and literally uncountable counts of corruption and/or incompetence in this administration combined with that core 40-45% still supporting it no matter what it says or does, and their increasingly voluminous voices joining together in hatred of others (which also unfortunately only embitters the exact same feelings in those who oppose them), I just cannot look at the two parties as being equivalent - I can't.

The fact that Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist who is also contrarily soft on gun control and has pretty consistently opposed a number of other breaches of our rights when no-one else would, has been able to capture roughly a little under half of the party's voters over the past two election cycles (with way more than that that at least liked and would support him if he was the candidate - around 70% of voters from last I checked, which was close to the same mark as Biden), tells me that there's at least some kind of sane future with this party...even if it's with a lot of unfortunately necessary compromise. I do not currently see any kind of sane future with the Republican Party.

I also fear that our economic system is likely to completely crash and disintegrate, if it hasn't started to already, sometime within my lifetime, and if that's the case, I much rather prefer people that care at least a little to be in charge (or at least those who pretend to) when it happens rather than the proud looters and naked debasers currently running this clown show.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[Zoraptor]

The problem with voting for a bad option instead of a worse one is that the only thing the people putting up the bad option care about is that enough people think the other guy is worse. You end up perpetuating the cycle which sees the two bad options in the first place. It's quite something to say that the options for US voters will be a decrepit dementia addled probable sex offender with multiple political skeletons in his closet- and the other option is Donald Trump. This discussion is probably better suited for the Politics thread rather than here though.

In covid19 news; WHO says there's no evidence that surviving infection confers immunity.

It's pretty likely that that's a statement like their 'no evidence of human to human transmission [yet]' one where they do find some sort of immunity after further study. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's pretty short term immunity though given how the common cold coronavirus behaves. If it doesn't though then it's bad news for vaccines as well, since they rely on priming the human immune system. There's also the possibility of it going 'dormant'/ hiding in DNA, like chickenpox or HIV.

[rjshae]

3 hours ago, ComradeMaster said:

Also, I'm getting the impression that the U.S. government is hiding the actual death toll, which seems strangely low for the confirmed cases but who knows.

I seriously doubt that; tallies occur at the state level, and most are not going to undersell the risk factor to the public. The US medical funding system is abominable, but we do have a lot of very good medical facilities and staff.

[Zoraptor]

2 minutes ago, rjshae said:

I seriously doubt that; tallies occur at the state level, and most are not going to undersell the risk factor to the public.

Yeah, it seems unlikely at least from the outside that the US federal government could undersell the death toll, unless they had collusion with the individual States. OTOH I'd strongly suspect some States would only be including deaths which can definitively be attributed to covid19 in their figures, especially if they don't want to have or want to leave a lockdown type situation; or aren't in a situation where they're able to include them yet. Places like New York or the UK/ France got very large jumps in their tolls once they started including deaths outside hospitals; at home or in aged care facilities. Also, deaths tend to lag infection rates significantly. Many of those dying today caught the disease 2-3 weeks ago so death rates tend to lag infection rates by 2-3 weeks. The US as a whole also has several advantages- generally younger population, and lower overall population density- than the heavily suffering European countries.

At this point I don't think the US death rate is suspiciously low.

[213374U]

21 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

This discussion is probably better suited for the Politics thread rather than here though.

And done. There's a significant overlap between COVID-19 and politics, but the overt China/US bashing doesn't really belong in this thread. So I'm going full CCP and enforcing strict topic distancing rules.

 

21 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

In covid19 news; WHO says there's no evidence that surviving infection confers immunity.

They seem to be "clarifying" their stance now.

 

Edited April 26, 2020 by 213374U

[Malcador]

 

Some Canadians are confused about which country they are in, I find.

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

 

Some Canadians are confused about which country they are in, I find.

Malc why arent the police arresting people or forcing them to adhere to lock-down regulations ?

[Raithe]

[rjshae]

17 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Yeah, it seems unlikely at least from the outside that the US federal government could undersell the death toll, unless they had collusion with the individual States. OTOH I'd strongly suspect some States would only be including deaths which can definitively be attributed to covid19 in their figures, especially if they don't want to have or want to leave a lockdown type situation; or aren't in a situation where they're able to include them yet. Places like New York or the UK/ France got very large jumps in their tolls once they started including deaths outside hospitals; at home or in aged care facilities. Also, deaths tend to lag infection rates significantly. Many of those dying today caught the disease 2-3 weeks ago so death rates tend to lag infection rates by 2-3 weeks. The US as a whole also has several advantages- generally younger population, and lower overall population density- than the heavily suffering European countries.

At this point I don't think the US death rate is suspiciously low.

There are some indications that the virus was spreading through the states earlier than expected, which would suggest there may have been more deaths that were just tallied as natural causes. But the count would probably be low at that point.

[Malcador]

8 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Malc why arent the police arresting people or forcing them to adhere to lock-down regulations ?

Apparently they were adhering to social distance guidelines and it is a protest so.

[Totally not Gorgon]

The cops have started designating 'no stop' zones. You can walk through but you can't sit around and chill. If you chill, you get fined. 

 

[BruceVC]

33 minutes ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

The cops have started designating 'no stop' zones. You can walk through but you can't sit around and chill. If you chill, you get fined. 

 

You Danes are cracking the whip.....you guys becoming dictatorial 

[Raithe]

RawStory - Leader of North Carolina anti-lockdown protests tests positive for Covid-19

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, Raithe said:

RawStory - Leader of North Carolina anti-lockdown protests tests positive for Covid-19

And she still has the audacity to complain about being forced to stay at home 

[Gorgon]

Just booked my Covid test to go to the dentist. Fingers crossed, lol. 

[Volourn]

That's weird. The article doesn't say why she took the test. Was she forced to or did she requested. She says had no (or little) symptoms - the people they tend not to test so why was she tested in the first place? Hmmm...