BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

suppressing a new strain and starving it out of existence in its infancy requires, in fact, a global network of highly funded labs to do the serology work.

How does 'doing serology' after the event 'starve a strain out of existence'?

It doesn't achieve anything does it?

i have literally been pointing this out to you since forever, duh. it doesn't mean serological work is pointless: we need to understand which strains are dominant in order to tweak and design better vaccines, for one.

all you can put forward, ever, is 'just think if china had done the right thing 2.5 years ago'. yes dilbert, great point.

i guess we should just shut down the movement of people forever now. it's ok! we can sit at home and blame china on the internet.

a solution has been found!

uziq wrote:

i have literally been pointing this out to you since forever, duh. it doesn't mean serological work is pointless: we need to understand which strains are dominant in order to tweak and design better vaccines, for one.

The virus is always going to mutate faster than vaccines can catch up, your argument makes no sense.

Dilbert_X wrote:

We can stop it 'gaining global ascendancy' if we stop travel - as most Australian states did well before vaccines were even available.

All other cases here were brought in by travellers, not on Amazon boxes.

here we fuuuuuucking go again.

covid travels on surfaces as well as 'gawping tourists'. the delta variant has broken through china's stringent ingressing travel rules several times now, most likely within their cold-chain supply network.

the idea we could have isolated wuhan 'in the early days' and nipped it in the bud is similarly a fantasy of control. wuhan is the main logistics and trade hub of the most populous country on earth, the world's second biggest economy and one of the global system's biggest exporters. even if the chinese government were perfectly transparent and called for international assistance, it's very likely that we were always chasing a horse that had already bolted its stable. by the point that covid started turning up in wuhan's hospital wards and alerting those early frontline doctors, it was likely already way, way beyond the environs of wuhan.

we live in a system where one can order a good from the other side of the world and expect it to be on our doorstep with a bow-tie within 3–4 days. how the fuck do you suppose a highly infectious new pathogen was going to stay put in the busiest logistics hub in the world for weeks?

here we go again. compare covid to leprosy (general in the world population for 2000+ years) or the black plague (ravaged europe in continuous waves for 300 years) yet again. 'medieval containment just worked in the past!'

comparing viruses is really stupid. each one is different. covid-19 is a highly transmissible, long-incubating, fairly long-lasting respiratory illness, not a contact-transmitted skin affliction or a rapidly killing ebola-type virus.

how do you really suppose we could have nipped covid in the bud in wuhan? are you quite ignorant of even the basics of the disease at this point in your rant-fogged, myopic little mind?

covid has an asymptomatic incubation period of up to 14 days. during this time, it is literally supercycling within the host's body and replicating itself millions of times. during the latter half of this window, and before the patient becomes seriously ill (~2-3 weeks into the infection, at its 'peak'), the host starts shedding these virus copies, with every single exhaled breath, with every wipe of the hand, with every cough or sneeze or yawn.

so 'patient zero' in wuhan was walking around a densely populated city for potentially 2 weeks without even a sign they were spreading. that's wuhan: one of the major international logistics hubs anywhere in the world, not the hinterlands of the ivory coast in a small tribal community. wuhan.

in addition, upon falling seriously ill and entry to hospital, it's not like every frontline dr. in the world sends off their seriously ill patients for testing and genomic sequencing. old person presents with flu-like symptoms in the dead of winter? old person dies of pneumonia on a hospital ward? yeah, the first wave of covid patients were likely being triaged as flu or flu-like illness (many european states' noted post-mortem that a lot of their dead in the first winter actually died of covid but it wasn't suspected as such; that's because hospitals don't do deep analysis on every person who is sick with a respiratory illness in winter, duh). even the most wary and perspicacious frontline doctors couldn't have just snapped their fingers and gotten their patients a fast-pass through the virological establishment. these things take trends and serious numbers before the organisational-bureaucratic weight of the medical system shifts. that's just practical human reality. people turn up at hospitals with flu-like symptoms every winter and we, naturally, assume they have flu.

before this global pandemic shifted the world on its axis, could you have imagined the response if a doctor had said to his national government, 'we need to ground all international flights and completely seal off this city of 12 million people. shutter all its businesses immediately. i've just had a first patient come into the hospital with a nasty flu-like illness!' it was only when the picture started to become overwhelmingly clear that this thing was much, much worse than flu did people rightfully raise the alarm. but patient zero? even patient 25? no way.

so essentially for the first 2 weeks to a month, covid was free to spread. that's just by its design, based on the basics of its incubation period and infectivity window alone. it had probably left wuhan – again, an extremely busy logistics hub – before even the first death. it was out there.

(i'm not denying that china prevaricated and downright lied about the picture when it did draw their attention, particularly in demurring to the WHO about human-to-human transmission. they undoubtedly put the world back weeks, if not months, in its ability to meaningfully respond and enter crisis mode. but covid had been spreading for weeks before even the big bad evil CCP started mishandling it.)

this fantasy of total control really tickles me. you say i am someone 'who needs to be told what to do by someone else'. meanwhile you advocate for the most totalitarian measures possible, all but throwing your hands up in the air and begging for the leaders/technocrats/god knows what magicians to exert total control over a situation and 'just fix it!!!' china is the world's most authoritarian state and, by far, the most technologically advanced so far as surveillance, tracking, and particularly biometrics go. they have ooodles of data on their citizens which go far beyond anything imaginable in a western, liberty- and privacy-conscious framework. every single apartment block in china is basically biometrically mapped out, apartment by apartment, with everything pooled on local party databases. china has tried to wage a 'zero covid' war for the last 2 years – and has failed utterly.

china, the most sophisticated surveillance state in the history of mankind, has been unable to eradicate covid. and yet here you are, still seriously pretending that humanity could have kept this thing bottled. it's just funny to me. it's more symptomatic of your own psychology and state of mind, if anything, this constant wringing of hands and ranting about 'what could have been done' and 'we just need total measures'. you're a little lickspittle fascist baby.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-25 17:24:43)

the world was not 'supposed to be prepared for this'. it was mentioned by scientists for decades, yes, that there would be a 'big one', and that an increasingly globalized system carried with it the attendant risk of a truly global pandemic. but scientists mentioning it, reports being written, test scenarios and simulations being run, is not the same as 'the world being prepared'. at very few times before in human history have we had to truly act collectively as a species, to coordinate on a global level. 'the world was supposed to be prepared' for bad news about climate change in the 1970s, too. there's a huge gap between theoretical knowledge and practice.

china used some of the most illiberal measures on the planet, sometimes even welding families into their own homes/compounds, or disappearing infected people at will and removing them to god knows what place, indefinitely. not exactly encouraging. and you're being awfully convenient there, taking their statistics at face value after 2 years of saying 'hmm, china are definitely lying to us about their case/death numbers'. wait, now they totally eradicated it? great glorious leader xi jinping!!!

'every country in the world' was infected because the world system is connected globally. i don't know how many times i have to rehearse this to you. chinese workers took covid to europe, garment workers in italy mostly. it wasn't 'needless travel'. as i said above: how was it ever really practicable for the world economy to shut down for the sake of an as-yet-unidentified flu-like illness? you have no grip on the complexity of reality, it's really quite amusing.

gweilo is a mandarin word, not japanese. and no modern chinese person says gweilo. it died out in colloquial use in the 19th century. it would be like calling someone a dago or a pickaninny.

it is incredibly archaic. when did you last speak to an actually chinese person? i know this because i have had several conversations with chinese people about their term for foreigners, as i have done with koreans about the way they refer to 'waeguk-in'.

the more common, modern and neutral term is 'laowai' and its derivations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laowai

perhaps in a boardroom 'gweilo' could be used by a boomer, but it is consciously considered a very old-fashioned phrase. any use of it carries that connotation. to call a foreigner a 'foreign devil' is to consciously invoke a very different worldview from the 19th century. it would be like accusing a european visitor of being a dirty bohemian or an untrustworthy boche.

and cantonese/mandarin doesn't have much to do with japanese. perhaps you were trying to remember the word 'gaijin', and not an antique word last widely used in canton ca. 1880? (and south korea isn't in south-east asia, just to remind you.)

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-25 20:15:11)

I don't care if I die from covid at this point

A person who hires prostitutes probably shouldn't be calling someone a creepy sex pest.

imo

Glass houses.

Where you guys get this stuff from I have no idea.

i read the scientific research as it's in pre-press and publication phase. you know, peer-reviewed stuff, not news articles which pick up on the most sensational or alarming details and spin them into attention-grabbing clickbait narratives.

this isn't the only variant of concern we have noted with many mutations. the simple fact is that, at the moment, we have no idea whether its mutations make it more effective or less (and less is still a possibility). the most noteworthy thing about it at this moment is, as you said, that it has a great number of mutations. well, that doesn't mean every single mutation is an adaptation that is uniquely capable of overcoming the human immune response; it just means it varies a great deal from its adjacent strain.

this could be bad news; but it could be no news. what you don't hear about, because you don't read the actual scientific papers, is that strains like this are noted on a weekly basis and have been continuously tracked. i mentioned a few days ago a variant-of-concern of delta that was gaining prominence in the UK, accounting for something like 10–15% of all new cases in a month – a very rapid growth. but thus far it hasn't presented itself as the world-changing, life-ending variant, either.

it's highly unlikely that covid will suddenly leap into an altogether different beast. it's not suddenly going to become twice as deadly because of a minor variation in its spike protein. in this, i do hedge my bets with the cautious optimism of experts such as the virology team at the francis crick institute: we haven't seen a disastrous mutation in 2 years of near-uncontained spread across the entire human population group, and thus it's unlikely it has any major surprises in store for us in the future. covid has practically had a global-scale open air laboratory in which to try out new variants for the last 18 months.

we should be careful and heed the caution sounded by virologists/serologists, of course, but to say that this winter is the 'worst case scenario unfolding' is just hilariously off the mark. read some vaccine/booster studies. you'll feel better.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-25 23:29:29)

Actual picture of uziq pointing to research data which doesn't really say what he thinks it does

But stopping travel achieves nothing, just let the vaccines work.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I still wouldn't be at all surprised to learn the Chinese are seeding lab-developed new variants here and there.

The first one worked great on Northern Europeans, they're definitely going to need another optimised for Africans.

i fucking LOVE that you accuse me of 'not properly understanding what i read' (thanks, i get paid to do it for a living ...)

with that said, do let me know when you intimatately understand bonferroni corrections, spearman's rho, students t-tests, etc. i'm sure you're a whizz at the science of statistical significance and inferring meaningful results from data, what with all those engineering software programs you use to plug numerical values into pre-existing formulas, and all that CAD software you puzzle over. i almost forgot that you have research-level statistics under your belt as well.

and then you spout this absolutely insane conspiracy theory claptrap, as if to prove your legendary intelligence twice-over.

i'm sure china are flying secret stealth planes over botswana, seeding rare new covid mutations using chem trails. or something.

you are a dipshit.

Well seems like governments the world over are alarmed by the mutation, airports are being closed to flights from southern africa left and right.

all of europe immediately closed borders last december over the 'UK variant' too. was it the world-ending nightmare scenario? does anyone even talk about the UK variant anymore?

the simple fact is that any claims about this new strain are entirely premature. papers are quoting one guy who over-animatedly called it 'the worst ever variant'. there's no evidence of that yet. we have just observed a highly mutated version that packs many novel features. many of those features might not even be conducive to better infectivity/more lethality. we simply DO NOT KNOW. that's called ... science.

i love how dilbert tries to condescend to me. he's an applied engineer who doesn't know anything about virology. nor do i, of course, in any sort of professional and credentialled way. but i do read the fucking stuff for about 2 hours a day. you guys need to stop reading newspaper headlines. maybe this 'cultural studies' graduate needs to tell you a thing or two about how newspapers aren't perfect founts of knowledge?

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-26 05:02:46)