A Fifth of Coronavirus

[majestic]

22 minutes ago, Amentep said:

I'm jealous of all the COVID long hair stories. Thanks to receding hairline genetics that has my forehead hairline and my back of the neck hairline rushing to meet one another at the back of my head, all I looked like when I couldn't get a haircut was someone trying to get by with a particularly unconvincing comb-over. 

SCNR.

[Gfted1]

6 hours ago, BruceVC said:

The lockdown and pandemic has lead to most of us breaking our normal routines and how we use to live day to day. Each person has changed certain things and some of these  things are important to an overall healthy and sustainable lifestyle

That is why I created a rigid structure to my day during the lockdown, for example  the time I start working, how much take-aways I get and how much news I watch

I did the same. Im a routine driven animal so every day I make a point of getting up at the same time I always did, performing the 3 S's (sh!t/shower/shave), and logging in or going to work.

Where Ive fallen down is in my physical activity and also now Ill take the occasional afternoon nap on my couch. I used to walk around the block a few times every day but then winter settled in and I said screw that. I think I put on ~12 pounds over the last year! Now that its warming up I think Ill start doing that again.

[Gromnir]

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

I'm jealous of all the COVID long hair stories. Thanks to receding hairline genetics that has my forehead hairline and my back of the neck hairline rushing to meet one another at the back of my head, all I looked like when I couldn't get a haircut was someone trying to get by with a particularly unconvincing comb-over. 

guess we should appreciate our minor tonsorial obstacles. sure, takes an extra minute or two to wash hair, and then combing out all the tangles is a pain in the arse. unless we wanna get the random stray hair while eating we gotta wear a hat while preparing and consuming food, which is weird and wrong, but whatever.

our hair hasn't begun to noticeable gray or thin, but it could happen at some point. guess we should be thankful.

*chuckle*

our previous financial guy retired a bit over a year ago, before pandemic but after we had retired. our new finance guy is the person recommended by our previous guy. whatever. when we first met new guy in his office, he kept calling us "young man," which we thought were odd. sure, we were dressed kinda causal, but the guy on the other side o' the desk were probable in his mid to late forties. Gromnir were fifty. occurred to us that clay, (people in california are sometimes named "clay,") might be making a subtle joke 'bout us retiring relative young so we asked. clay were genuine shocked by our age. 

perhaps the fact we look like some kinda unkempt hippie (sans the birkenstocks) and need all-too-frequent pull strands o' our own hair outta the omelet we made is the sorta stuff o' which we should see the bright side, but we don't.

as an aside, with the yankee situation and other similar events, is looking more and more like the vaccine is less efficacious at preventing infection than perhaps hoped. vaccine were tested for how it reduced chance o' becoming ill, and so far it looks like all the vaccines is dong a fantastic job o' that, even with the variants. were never definitive known exact how much protection the vaccine offered from the vaccinated nevertheless being able to catch and spread covid. positive: so far don't seem like those infected who has been vaccinated is producing enough viral load to be a serious concern for spreading covid-19. nevertheless, for the folks with compromised immune systems, am suspecting stay-at-home may be the status quo for awhile. 

am now gonna go sweep in the kitchen. the amount o' Gromnir hair we sweep up now equals or exceeds dog hair. this change is embarrassing. 

HA! Good Fun!

[LadyCrimson]

Re: hair - Still can't use a pair of scissors for more than a snip or two.  Past few weeks I look in the mirror and have 70's flashbacks. Soon I'll be Cousin Itt from Adams Family, only greyer and a lot more scraggly.

[Gorth]

6 hours ago, Gromnir said:.

our hair hasn't begun to noticeable gray or thin, but it could happen at some point. guess we should be thankful.

Lucky bastard

I’ve had grey hair for so long that I’ve almost forgotten there was a time before it. I had noticeably grey hair at the age of 22 and friends at uni asked me if I used some kind of peroxide to create a particularly noticeable white, curly lock in middle of my forehead

Other than the hair colour I’ve seen to maintain a “youthful” exterior though, people often estimating my age at early thirties. I guess I should just shave my head and remove the grey evidence of my advanced age

[LittleArmadillo0]

My hair grows like a weed, I recently cut off my hair to celebrate some newfound freedom. Me and my father had has been growing our since the lockdowns in started in March and decided we would get it cut when we got our vaccines/ the pandemic was over. I ended up cutting 8 inches off and my father had to cut it in December because his beard hair was too long and thick to properly wear a mask.

[rjshae]

SF General Hospital has 0 COVID-19 hospitalizations for 1st time in more than year

Man I'll bet that feels good. Vacations for everybody...

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, rjshae said:

SF General Hospital has 0 COVID-19 hospitalizations for 1st time in more than year

Man I'll bet that feels good. Vacations for everybody...

That is good news, vaccines are a wonderful thing 

[Gfted1]

Efficacy of Chinese vaccines is “not high”—officials back 3rd dose.

[BruceVC]

20 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Efficacy of Chinese vaccines is “not high”—officials back 3rd dose.

Why am I not surprised with the lack of efficacy from the Chinese vaccines, 50 % or less as the article mentions

But I dont see the issue with it only lasting 6 months and needing another jab because my understanding is 6 months is normal for all vaccines .....or rather we dont have enough definitive  data to understand how long your Corona anti-bodies created by any vaccine will last?

[Totally not Gorgon]

I'm supposed to be eligible for a vaccine offer this month. With my luck it will be September. 

[Gfted1]

Whats bad about September?

[Malcador]

It's 3 months from now ?

[Totally not Gorgon]

We got shafted with dosages. It's basically the same for any country that doesn't produce its own vaccine. Geopolitics. 

[Sarex]

2 minutes ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

We got shafted with dosages. It's basically the same for any country that doesn't produce its own vaccine. Geopolitics. 

Any country that relied on the covax program, a bunch made other arrangements.

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

Any country that relied on the covax program, a bunch made other arrangements.

The Covax program is a good idea but its designed for countries without money or governments that claim they dont have money. Its a terrible way to achieve  " herd immunity"  but its the most effective way if you dont have resources

For example in Africa the majority of countries immediately signed up to it and SA was a big sponsor and supporter of it but we have also ordered our own vaccines and we have a company that is able to produce J&J. We are the only African country where the private sector made this investment. The biggest problem with the Covax program in Africa is  its a round robin system and they allocate vaccines on a per country basis

But there are over 1 billion people in Africa and Covax can only give a few million per country and then move onto the next country  .....imagine how long that will take to reach " herd immunity " at the current rate. We talking about years  before you will vaccinate 60-70 % of the population of each African country that signed up for Covax. Hopefully the supply of vaccines will increase 

[Totally not Gorgon]

22 hours ago, Sarex said:

Any country that relied on the covax program, a bunch made other arrangements.

The EU ordered plenty, and produced plenty internally. They just relied on the manufacturer for distribution and allocation. I think they are suing Astrazeneca for it.  

[rjshae]

22 hours ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

We got shafted with dosages. It's basically the same for any country that doesn't produce its own vaccine. Geopolitics. 

I like to think of it this way: if those nations didn't fund new vaccine development in record time, it would take even longer for everybody else to get a vaccine. The fact that they are getting the vaccines first is what motivated the spending in the first place. Sure it's selfish, but it's human nature to take care of your own first.

[BruceVC]

16 minutes ago, rjshae said:

I like to think of it this way: if those nations didn't fund new vaccine development in record time, it would take even longer for everybody else to get a vaccine. The fact that they are getting the vaccines first is what motivated the spending in the first place. Sure it's selfish, but it's human nature to take care of your own first.

Their is  a lot of finger pointing and blaming going on from many countries around the shortage of vaccines. What gets ignored is when many countries, like SA, didnt order vaccines directly and bought in to the flawed Covax program. First priority for every government should be to order vaccines for their citizens 

But some countries somehow managed to order vaccines and have been hugely successful compared to other countries like the EU and these are countries that are not as wealthy or organized. This link discusses this 

 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

[Elerond]

1 hour ago, rjshae said:

I like to think of it this way: if those nations didn't fund new vaccine development in record time, it would take even longer for everybody else to get a vaccine. The fact that they are getting the vaccines first is what motivated the spending in the first place. Sure it's selfish, but it's human nature to take care of your own first.

It was really funding of development issue considering that BioNTech got their vaccine working already in January 2020. Issue has been to test it and mass produce it. Even though they got their vaccine working lab in January 2020 it wasn't until April 2020 when they were able to start clinical tries after signing agreement with Pfizer (who gave them 113 million dollars. EU then gave them 100 million euros and Germany gave them 375 million euros, so that they could finish clinical tries and start mass production. Pfizer for some reason decided not to take money from US warp speed fund ) and it took all the way to December 2020 to get approval for the vaccine.

Scaling up vaccine production has not been easy for Pfizer as vaccine is produced in three stages. First stage is molecular cloning of DNA plasmids which is done in one factory in USA where it is transferred to stage two facilities, which there are two, one in USA and one in Germany, where they produce desired mRNA strands. From these facilities mRNA strands are transferred to stage three facilities, where mRNA strands are combined with  lipid nanoparticles and filled in vials and frozen. There are also only two stage three facilities, one in USA and one in Belgium. All the vaccine dozes outside of USA are finalized in factory in Belgium (meaning that Pfizer vaccines that go to other parts of america than USA need two flights over Atlantic ocean). Whole production sequence according to BioNTech-Pfizer took from start to finish 110 days in February 2021 and they were aiming to reduce it 60 days. Also Pfizer revealed that they use 280 components produced in 19 different countries to make the vaccine.  

BioNTech signed contract with German production facility to expand their vaccine production capacity (using those funds they got from the government) in September 2020. Expansion is estimated to be ready end of this year and then facility should be able to produce 750 million dozes per year. In April Pfizer got authorization to scale up their production facility in Belgium.

So it was more of question of where existing production facilities were located and as building new facilities just takes their time. 

[Zoraptor]

5 hours ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

The EU ordered plenty, and produced plenty internally. They just relied on the manufacturer for distribution and allocation. I think they are suing Astrazeneca for it.  

Ordered plenty, sure, something like 400 million doses. 300 million of them were from companies that still don't have a working product though. Then they ordered from AZ and expected them to give the EU preferential treatment over those that ordered earlier, because they were the EU and Very Important. If there's one thing I've inherited from my english roots it's a hatred of entitled queue jumpers.

The entire AZ thing is to deflect from the EU's procurement incompetence, because AZ is Anglo-Swedish and because the UK handled it so much better from outside the EU.

Or, to be fair, procurement bad luck; but I don't feel charitable when they're so obviously trying to blame someone else for political reasons.

[Skarpen]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/26/facebook-lifts-ban-on-calling-coronavirus-man-made/amp/

Facebook after months of banning people for questioning official version will not ban them when the official version changes. 

We have always been at war with Eastasia! 

[Totally not Gorgon]

well, got my spot in a week, so. I just gotta hold on a bit more. 

 

 

[Totally not Gorgon]

On 5/26/2021 at 10:18 PM, Zoraptor said:

Ordered plenty, sure, something like 400 million doses. 300 million of them were from companies that still don't have a working product though. Then they ordered from AZ and expected them to give the EU preferential treatment over those that ordered earlier, because they were the EU and Very Important. If there's one thing I've inherited from my english roots it's a hatred of entitled queue jumpers.

The entire AZ thing is to deflect from the EU's procurement incompetence, because AZ is Anglo-Swedish and because the UK handled it so much better from outside the EU.

Or, to be fair, procurement bad luck; but I don't feel charitable when they're so obviously trying to blame someone else for political reasons.

There is also the fact that the UK handled their covid response pretty poorly overall, and that as a result needed preferential treatment. Lockdowns are expensive and they didn't initially want to pay. 

[Totally not Gorgon]

On 5/27/2021 at 2:56 PM, Skarpen said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/26/facebook-lifts-ban-on-calling-coronavirus-man-made/amp/

Facebook after months of banning people for questioning official version will not ban them when the official version changes. 

We have always been at war with Eastasia! 

I have no idea how likely it is that the CCP covered up some sort of biological Chernobyl. Probably not very. I only know they aren't trustworthy.