BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

There was no reason for SARS-2 to become endemic except for the stupidity and shortsightedness of people like you

by the way, there's no reason for SARS-2 to be a contniuing global threat with modern vaccines and medicine, except for the suspicion, scepticism, and useful idiocy of people like you.

'they're experimental!' 'good luck convincing those dumb africans to take something with unknown consequences!'

I am telling you guys you need to just give up. Put on a tracksuit, have some pills mixed with apple sauce, put a plastic bag on your head and take a nap for awhile. COVID won't seem like such a big deal anymore when you are on a spaceship.

America invaded and conquered my people and then gave us all citizenship. Us and the Hawaiians can go where we please in America. That's the deal for the naval bases. This was all explained in a rap song in the Hamilton play.

India is not part of Australia. The Indians in fact rebelled.

The Australian aboriginals are fine. Australia needs to do right by them like we gave the Native Americans casinos and sports logos.

Have you ever watched Hamilton? Like I said, it is all explained there. With some hard work and determination any Puerto Rican from NYC can become a founding father. Someday I plan to be Benjamin Franklin.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

SARS-2 has an up to 2 week latency period during which it is maximally transmissible; then serious symptoms appear.

All the more reason to lock down travel and impose quarantine for the small number of exceptions.

If you don't understand the fundamentally different challenges that poses to epidemiology, then i can't help you. go and read a book. preferably a children's history of the plague.

I understand it all fine, thank you, I even had some pet gerbils.

how the fuck do you lock down and effectively isolate a disease that’s undetectable for up to 2 weeks? we have been over this timeline dozens of times. sars-cov-2 was way beyond china’s borders before even the CCP honestly knew about it.

Liberal party policy is now decoupled from the health advice, every Liberal state is now fucked.
When hospitals are overflowing they will have to rethink their 'everyone is getting covid' plan.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-01/ … /100734090

WA Is still doing OK with daily cases in single figures.

a 40 day quarantine? how would anyone with a job, i.e. an economically productive member of society, spend 40 days in a quarantine facility?

Its amazing how many people decided their essential travel wasn't worth seven or fourteen days of quarantine after all

uuuhm more like most people had to make a decision between ‘essential’ travel, to see family, to help dying relatives, to attend funerals, etc, and between losing their job because they couldn’t get the requisite month off work.

and you still seemingly have trouble getting to grips with the idea that, even with a lightning fast and perfectly transparent response from the chinese, covid’s inception, it’s first zoonotic leap or it’s first leak, however you want to phrase it, would have been practically out there for 3-4 weeks regardless. what don’t you fucking understand about that? responding to SARS-1 was immensely easier. you’re still talking about SARS-CoV-2 as if it was just a missed opportunity to smother it in its cradle. fucking HOW?!

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-31 22:57:16)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Except it wasn't everywhere, it took a while to get there and many places squashed it when it did.

It was only further travel which spread it again.

If we'd known what was happening in Oct-Dec 2019 this would have been squashed.

wrong. retroactive sampling and testing has showed signs of covid in europe, at the time unsuspected and undiagnosed, as early as october 2019, with mid-december being highly likely.

i ask you, again, to bear in mind the practicalities of noticing, testing for, and diagnosing new respiratory-type illnesses during peak winter season, i.e. 'cold and flu' season. there are already 4 main flu types and at least 4 main coronaviruses in common circulation at this time. people reporting to hospitals or the elderly developing pneumonia as sequelae from these illnesses would not immediately draw much attention. intensive sampling and genomic sequencing wasn't being performed on the first patients to report to hospital with covid-19 in europe in october/december.

europe's first confirmed covid case was the end of january 2021. italy didn't confirm its first cases of their first-wave epidemic, in rome, until january 31st 2021. don't you think that's just a little, erm, late? for a virus that was apparently first detected in wuhan, at a global hub of trade and logistics, even if we take the official chinese date of early december 2020?

"it took a while to get there" you say? why? elsewhere you say, quite rightly, "you can order anything from anywhere in the world now and have it almost within 24 hours". but, according to the officially reported cases, it took covid from december 7th to january 31st to arrive in europe? did it take a camel train through the silk road or what? was patient one in italy Marco Polo?

many studies have raised the quite likely possibility that covid was in europe probably within those first few 'asymptomatic', unnoticed weeks of its emergence in wuhan. it is quite likely that infected person(s) or carriers took it to europe before the emergence was even noticed in china. the virus's mechanics make it practically into a silent viral charge with a 2-week timer.

e.g.

A 43-year-old man from Bobigny received treatment at a hospital near Paris on December 27, 2020, with complaints of a dry cough, difficulty breathing, and a fever.

He was suspected of having pneumonia, but his doctor Yves Cohen retested the swab in May 2020. It came back SARS-CoV-2-positive. The man had reportedly not traveled abroad.

or e.g.

Environmental monitoring in three Italian cities revealed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewage samples taken between October 2019 and February 2020.

The studyTrusted Source, which was conducted by Rome’s Department of Environment and Health, found that of the 15 positive samples detected, eight dated back to before February 2020. The earliest was found on December 18, 2019, in Milan and Turin, suggesting that the virus was already circulating in mid-December 2019.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens … at.1009620

once again, what you consistently do here is extrapolate australia's or NZ's experience, and in particular the experience of your state of 1.6 million people, to the world. many places are much more connected to international trade/movement of labour than australia/NZ, dilbert. it really didn't necessarily 'take a while' to get anywhere after its first emergence. lots of business is conducted in wuhan; a lot of goods are distributed from wuhan. the experience of low-population island nations is surely not the model in this pandemic.

Dilbert wrote:

The fact is we're not doing enough now to give the vaccines a chance, they're always going to be running behind new variants every one of which will go global before we even know its happening.

'the fact is', every single clinical trial done so far shows that the vaccines, the mRNA vaccines especially, are still highly effective against the newer mutations of covid. as in, an order of magnitude more effective than any flu jab we have ever had available at our disposal. why do you consistently try to misrepresent this picture? if you have been recently boostered, you are 99.8% safe against any risk of severe disease.

'the fact is', we also have now several different antiviral pills available which are similarly effective against covid. many nations are already placing orders for tens of millions of them. this is early-stage tech and will only get better. it works.

we are not 'lagging behind variants and losing badly'. the death rate and hospitalization rate has been more or less flat since widespread vaccination was adopted in the uK, for instance. how are you going to say this is a unique catastrophe? jesus fucking christ, once again, with your vaccine skepticism and hysteria.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-01 04:46:27)

isn't it weird. whenever a new variant has emerged after the inception of the pandemic, we can see new cases going global within a month at most, even with sometimes extensive efforts to contain it and restrict travel.

but the original covid virus took 3 months to get from wuhan to new york?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart … 677034bf8c

Findings from the study, which tested stored blood samples from between December 2019 and January 2020 for Covid-19 antibodies and were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, indicated the presence of Covid-19 in several U.S. states “earlier than previously recognized.”

Researchers found positive test results, indicating prior exposure to the virus responsible for Covid-19, in samples from California, Oregon and Washington in mid-December, much earlier than the first official U.S. case on Jan. 19.   

Samples from Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin were also found to test positive for Covid-19 in January, before Covid-19 was believed to be present.

facts are inconvenient to you, i know.

it's hard to compare as the US still has a high prevalence of (a) unvaccinated and (b) delta cases.

but south africa are now reporting that their omicron wave is effectively expended and over. no rise in deaths and the rise in hospital admissions were markedly of a less-severe (and shorter-staying) nature.

i'd be extremely hesitant to say that this gives a good indication to any other nation - there's some fairly unique things about SA's own population and their recent covid rates - but it's good news nonetheless.

i think we still have a hangover from previous waves with the idea that 'hospitalization' necessarily equals death once the numbers get so high. but this thinking is not necessarily right. not everyone admitted to hospital is destined to require oxygen tanks or ventilators, or else they will die, as happened with nastier variants. many people are going to hospital with omicron at a peak of 2-3 days of serious illness and then leaving.

the entire idea that there is a gradient between 'high cases' = 'high hospitalizations' = 'lethal shortages and overflow for ICU beds and ward space' doesn't quite pertain here. there isn't the same pressure on life-saving care with omicron. by most reported accounts, the pressure is coming from shortage of staff. front-line workers are sick and understandably extremely burnt out.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-01 05:18:19)

i have certainly never said covid is 'just the flu', and i have very specifically said each time discussing the USA that you have high numbers of unvaccinated and high prevalence of relatively dangerous delta variant.

the collapse of leadership and public health direction in the states has really been something to behold. that coupled with immense political ructions and bipolarity in the population mean you are worse than any third-world nation at this stuff. congratulations.

again, i've never likened covid to flu, except to say that the vaccines we have are almost miraculously effective considering our prior record of fighting back against flu-type or corona-type illnesses. the vaccines we have represent an actual medical breakthrough in combating types of highly mutable disease we have never been able to get a grip on in the past. 'good' and widely deployed flu vaccines in the past have been - at best - 60% effective, perhaps, and here you have dilbert on a weekly basis bemoaning the 'catastrophe' of our 'poor vaccines' with their 85-90%+ immunities.

in terms of epidemiological case studies, comparing the covid-19 pandemic to bubonic plague, or ebola, or fucking leprosy, is plain dumb and should be dismissed out of hand. but, actually, in terms of a meaningful comparison, it is far more instructive to compare sars-cov-2 to the spanish influenza pandemic, i.e. something that was properly global, rather than sars-1, which was endemic and quite easily containable. but, again, this is not the same thing as saying 'covid-19 is the same beast as flu'.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-01 06:14:24)