uziq
Member
+492|3422

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!
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
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.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

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.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
you are literally, measurably wrong. booster shots, even with last year's vaccine tech, make a huge and measurable difference against all current (that is, newer than the vaccines) strains.

a booster shot of moderna/pfizer will top you up nicely and give you significant protection against delta for 6+ months.

the mutations have not outpaced the vaccines thus far. old vaccines become less and less effective as the virus moves on, that's true, but there hasn't been some reset and runaway strain that totally eludes the vaccines. AZ and J&J wear off and become less effective over time; well, ok. get a booster shot this winter and, for all intents and purposes, you will be protected.

true, right now we don't have any available vaccines that can give truly long-lasting protection. but that's neither here nor there. we've never had a vaccine that could give long-lasting protection for flu, either, and yet people aren't tearing their hair out in despair because they have to spend 15 minutes every winter getting a flu jab.

also, you literally don't understand even the basics of evolution, which is just funny. just because the virus will constantly mutate and try out new combinations, it doesn't follow that the picture will always be radically changing. there is more or less inter-generational variation in all living things; some rise up over time to become dominant, and in turn edge out less-competitive strains; some are just surface eddies on the pool of life, minor experiments that achieve nothing and lead nowhere and disappear as quickly as they appeared. that's literally what evolution is! so that covid 'will always mutate', yes, certainly, but it's also conceivable that over the next 3–5 years its 'ecology' will settle down into several dominant strains which have done a better job than all the rest. do you see now why serology matters? just as flu has 'settled' into 4 or so major strains globally, it's conceivable that we will be tracking several major strains of covid which we will then develop vaccines for. this is why serology is GOOD. and also, incidentally, why you are fucking CLUELESS.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-25 16:32:56)

uziq
Member
+492|3422

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?
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Well we've contained other, nastier things, we've utterly failed on this.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
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)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
The world was supposed to be prepared for something like this, in fact it was, too many people were dishonest, duplicitous and self serving.

China did effectively have this thing eradicated and was reinfected by - guess what - international travel.

Every country in the world has been infected by - guess what - international travel.

Why are you so obsessed with travel? The world is in a pandemic and all you can think about is - guess what - international travel.

Please gweilo yourself out in Japan.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
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.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
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)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
So what is the correct japanese word for 'creepy white sex pest'?
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
War Man
Australians are hermaphrodites.
+563|6683|Purplicious Wisconsin
I don't care if I die from covid at this point
The irony of guns, is that they can save lives.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

So what is the correct japanese word for 'creepy white sex pest'?


oh diddums, you poor thing. im sorry that i'm a 31-year-old man living a full and extended life. really, i am.

don't you have any remaining cats handy to sexually stimulate you?
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

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

imo

Glass houses.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
indeed, i’ve never even patronised or given money to a stripper, let alone a hooker.

which reminds me, haven't you posted here multiple times with images of women that you aren't even linked with, but that you, erm, know in some vague or professional capacity. 'good things that happened to dilbert today: look! this woman who attends my gun club was photographed at an event!'. talk about creepy, jesus fuck . i hope australia has robust restaining orders.

as always, dilbert’s posts are very psychologically revealing. sorry that girls like me! you cuck.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-25 20:58:56)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Where you guys get this stuff from I have no idea.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Larssen
Member
+99|1857

uziq wrote:

well done at linking a news article larssen. i just mentioned 3 posts ago that there’s been several variants of concern this winter. it’s going to be that way, every winter … forever. coronaviruses mutate. genomic sequencing and serology labs will be looking out for this sort of thing for the foreseeable future. it’s prudent and it’s good epidemiology.

feel free to lose your mind every time a news story surfaces about a variant. you are honestly wasting your time. may as well tear your hair out every time the tides come in.

i’m reading scientific papers at the coal face of this unfolding picture every day. there’s literally dozens of such variants/sub-strains out there right now. it’s impossible to tell at first what’s a blip or small cluster and what’s the next globally dominant strain. it’s just as possible that delta will have edged the evolutionary advantage and 95% of all other strains will eventually die out.

once again:
covid is never going to disappear.
covid is never going to stop mutating.
seasonal swings and variations are always going to happen.
It's nice that you spend your time reading scientific articles on covid mutation, and that you stated there are 'variants of concern'. Way to state the obvious indeed, nobody expected this at all save for self anointed megabrain uziq. How tiresome it must be to converse with other lesser beings.

1. A variant that is so mutated that it's radically different from the original strain, has some 30 mutations on the spike protein and other mutations that are associated with rapid spread, and which has seemingly overtaken delta in its region of discovery is a massive potential problem.

If there is a strain that hits both evasiveness to antibodies/vaccination/immunity and which has rapid spread, while perhaps maintaining lethality, I shouldn't need to spell out what that means.

2. I have less and less faith that we can science our way out of that. The science and scientific consensus moves at a glacial pace compared to virus spread. By the time your dataset is large enough to state beyond doubt that this strain is a massive problem, it'll already be endemic probably. If delta is anything to go by, our crude preventive measures will not be able to contain a more infectious and evasive mutation either. Look at all the countries that unsuccesfully attempted zero covid strategies. Lastly, you'd have to possibly develop a new class of vaccines, which is the final nail in the proverbial coffin.


Looking back at how this crisis has evolved I'll have to admit to increasing pessimism. When covid was discovered, I didn't think it would become a pandemic. When it arrived, I believed containment would work. When whole countries locked down, I believed the vaccine would push the virus back to endemic status - I was wrong on each count. The virus has so far succesfully overcome all policy initiatives and we're waiting to confirm if it'll do so in all countries.

None of this is to say 'all is lost' though let's be clear that an optimistic outlook is at this point simply a belief as well. We could still well be here in the exact same situation in a years' time.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
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)

uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

Where you guys get this stuff from I have no idea.
probably the same place you get the idea from that i'm a 'creep' who moved to asia to meet, erm, asian women.

you haven't been to a major UK city or any university town in a while have you?

and why would a person in their 20s or 30s need to resort to creeping around the world in order to meet women? i think you're projecting a bit there. i was quite contented in my home acre.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Actual picture of uziq pointing to research data which doesn't really say what he thinks it does

https://i.imgur.com/jR78dsd.jpg
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Well seems like governments the world over are alarmed by the mutation, airports are being closed to flights from southern africa left and right.

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.
In this case I would prefer erring on the side of bad news. If we keep trying to predict future behaviour of variants based on past events for which you need a statistically significant amount of events (i.e. # of infections, hospitalisations, intensive care admittance, deaths) - we will again be too late to act. The scientifically sound method we know is insufficiently capable of providing foresight in a timely enough manner. Maybe in the future we'll get to a point where we can accurately predict viral spread solely based on the components of a virus, but until then let's just assume that mutations that are indicative of bad shit means bad shit.

This is not to say we can outrun this variant if it were more infective, more resistant and at least just as deadly as delta. It's foregone conclusion we can't. But you might be able to win some time in which you can ponder some hard to answer questions. Do we have effective measures? Are they proportional? Are there solutions in sight? And so on.

For the record, if variants start popping up that seriously diminish efficacy of antibodies and vaccines, which are just as deadly, and which spread even faster than delta, I'm probably gonna scoot over to the 'we should deny covid-related hospital & IC admission to individuals that refuse to vaccinate themselves' camp, as an in-between stop to the 'fuck it, nature wins' camp.

I'm already in the 1st camp tbh.

Last edited by Larssen (2021-11-26 04:14:24)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
But stopping travel achieves nothing, just let the vaccines work.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
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.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422

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)

Board footer

Privacy Policy - © 2024 Jeff Minard