BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

the japanese have had closed borders for almost the entire pandemic. it didn’t contain their own covid waves – only stringent lockdown measures in tokyo managed that, after months of them being in place. they also banned the sale and consumption of alcohol whenever case numbers rose: i'm sure you'd like that totally scientifically sound policy.

and, no, i’m not mad. i’m saying that we don’t know how a mutation scenario can play out. do you even understand the basics of evolution? not every mutation is an adaptation selected specifically to make things much worse for humans. a new variant could arise that is actually preferential to us, and which could replace nastier (i.e. causing more serious illness) strains with its improved transmissibility.

we simply do not know. politicians being precautious is one thing; you consistently being unscientific is another.

if you want the world system to shut down and all movement of people everywhere to be banned every time there’s a new variant of interest/variant of concern, then you should think very carefully about how the next decade is going to play out. there will always, always be new variants, new challengers for an ecological foothold. about the best we can hope for is precisely that a ‘highly contagious - low severity’ strain assumes precedence, one which spreads freely and widely and helps boost people up for herd immunity for whenever they do encounter a (putatively) rarer and nastier strain.

omicron has already been detected in just about every country that has banned travel. that’s just in the detected serology samples (you’ll laugh when you realise how many positive covid samples are forwarded on for genomic sequencing; a piteously small number). that means community transmission of this strain has kicked off apace and is ahead of the global ‘precautions’ – just about exactly as i’ve said would happen, repeating myself for months, in the event of any new development with covid. these travel bans might just take some pressure off medical/hospital systems during the winter and peak flu season (although maybe not). but over any sort of medium-term timeframe, any genuinely ascendant strain is going to arrive. NO COUNTRY ON EARTH managed to keep delta out, dilbert, need i remind you once again.

your solution? ‘we should have just banned all travel everywhere forever’. OK. i’m ‘obsessed’ with living in the real world, dilbert.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 15:37:54)

Can we talk about punishing China for COVID?

uziq wrote:

the movement of people ... is ESSENTIAL to the modern global economy.

NO it ISN'T

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

the movement of people ... is ESSENTIAL to the modern global economy.

NO it ISN'T

delta
arrived
in
china
continuously
despite closed borders for travel.

the majority of the planet don’t live in south australia. the australian/NZ models are not perfectly scaleable or exportable. many countries cannot achieve such isolation or decoupling from their regional economies, even if they wanted to.

but
new zealand
also
failed to contain delta.

if omicron is seriously vastly more transmissible, do you really think banning flights is going to do anything more than put a plaster on an arterial wound? you ask ‘for example’s, but seem to want to ignore the way this ENTIRE pandemic has played out.

keeping an eye on variants is a necessity so that we can better direct vaccine design, vaccination efforts, booster drives, etc. we can only ever really be RESPONSIVE. mother nature is just going to do what mother nature does, out there in the wild. we can’t have a perfect real-time observation of new mutations; it’s a fantasy of control and total information (meaning, really, total surveillance). we HAVE NOT MANAGED to control the spread of any major variant, period. variants have risen and fallen according to their own processes of natural/self-selection.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 16:07:46)

Dilbert_X wrote:

We know about the Omicron variant now, this would have taken months to get going.

wait ... what? we know about the omicron variant 'now'? do you realize how much work you're making that 'now' do in that sentence?

do you even understand the actual picture on-the-ground? let's be clear, here: we didn't detect omicron in any sort of timeframe to take meaningful preventative action. that's because it's a practical impossibility which science-superstitionists like yourself want to avoid acknowledging.

do you understand how many positive covid cases are even forwarded on for the lab-work to do genomic sequencing? it's expensive and time consuming and varies greatly by country. you're looking at anywhere from 0.3% of all positive cases to perhaps 15-20% of positive cases in leading first-world countries with oodles of resources and necessary expertise for this sort of thing.

by the time we start to notice new variants in the serological labs, the variant is already 'out there'. the chances of catching patient-zero and of perfectly isolating that cluster are vanishingly small – not impossible, certainly, but highly unlikely given the balance of probabilities.

on the same day that world governments announced travel bans, omicron had been detected on multiple continents, in turkey and hong kong ffs. that's according to their own local rates of serological activity, by the way, which, of course, see above, are not 100%. even a positive case turning up in a hotel quarantine system isn't necessarily having their covid strain sequenced.

turkey and hong kong both reported 'community transmission' of omicron. that's contract tracing polite-speak for 'we have no fucking idea how it got here'. that is, no provable link to recent travel in the 'red list' affected regions, e.g. botswana, south africa, etc.

now tell me again how we 'now' have a good head start on omicron. you simply do not understand the fucking picture at all. you're hopeless.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Chances are there is a nastier variant in the pipeline which we'll find out about in a month or two by which time it will be too late.

there's chances that there are less lethal variants in the pipeline too. that's evolution. may i direct you to elementary biology class?

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 16:38:16)

keep all borders shut permanently, right. because the virus is never going to stop generating new variations.

you could shut world borders for the next 10 decades and new mutations would develop within national borders, or within isolated cities, or whatever other smaller moities or subdivisions you want to create.

you entertain totalitarian fantasies of control. join the real world. this is the picture. a highly transmissible respiratory illness went global over 2 years ago. we are not putting it back in its box. vaccines, antivirals, social distancing measures, quarantines, work-from-home orders, etc, are the best arsenal we have. nothing is going to 'suppress' a new variant except the process of natural selection itself.

as i said, and said quite seriously, if omicron is 'more transmissible/less severe' in its outline, which is plausible though certainly nothing does indicate it as yet (in the data i've seen, anyway), then it would actually be desirable to have omicron attain global prevalance. a less-severe form of covid that could nudge out the nastier strains would be a highly advantageous use of viral selection. not saying this scenario is at all likely, considering, but it would at least take advantage of the implicit losing hand we have in all this. containment and suppression of covid failed long ago.

i don't mean engineer widespread spread of the disease. obviously precautions should be taken to stop people catching covid. duh.

but i mean new variants can change the picture in many ways. it's not necessarily a disaster scenario every time one appears. new variants are always going to seek the evolutionary edge amongst covid.

unknown variants are always going to rip, i don't know why you don't understand this. there's enough human beings on the planet, and enough genetic diversity, for covid to generate variations for the next century. it doesn't require unmitigated global spread to mutate a long way from its original strains, dilbert. do you really think we can perfectly divide the world's human populations according to national borders for the rest of ... forever? even one tiny country with an uncontained covid situation will be enough to incubate umpteen new strains, forever; we are not going to suppress case numbers globally, we can barely even coordinate global vaccination drives.

stressing about viral variations is like stressing about changes of wind and weather. it's mostly entirely beyond our control, the best we can do is develop better vaccine tech to mitigate/nullify against covid's effects. we are never going to shape the evolutionary path and development of the disease. if a new variant mutates which has a clear evolutionary advantage over others, then it will eventually go global, regardless of how stringently we control and limit our own travel. it is absolutely, literally inevitable.

just like flu, the best programme from here on out is to keep a tab on whichever variants are predominant, globally as well as regionally, and to administer seasonal vaccine shots accordingly. you are simply not willing to acknowledge reality if you don't realize that this is the endgame now.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 18:00:53)

that is literally one of the scenarios with a future variant of covid. if a more contagious/less severe variant emerges, it could be incidentally useful at building herd immunity throughout the seasonal-annual cycle.

that's not the same as saying 'give people covid on purpose'. it just means that the evolutionary engine which is spitting out all these world-shuttering variants could, just as plausibly, deliver a very well-adapted variant of covid that, from the virus's POV, is highly successful (i.e. replicates often, very transmissible, doesn't kill its host). it would actually be desirable for one of these 'mild' strains to edge out the others.

but people like dilbert just hear 'mutation ... danger will robinson ... shut down everything'. there's literally dozens of variants in flux at any one time. you can't spend the rest of forever cowering.

yes, keep making those entirely rational and adult contributions. you've been tinging the same triangle at the back of the chorus for 200 pages now.

i didn’t do anything to spread covid. i sat at home for 18 months. didn’t even see my girlfriend. thanks though !

Dilbert_X wrote:

"We can't restrict travel, what we need is more travel, lets infect everyone with COVID"

Genius.

except not what i said at all.

the new variant has already established community transmission, i.e. beyond contract tracing ability, in almost all of the countries to ban travel. talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. it only makes sense in a very limited, short-term way, to better mobilise vaccination or booster drives this winter. banning travel is markedly NOT a strategy to keep the variant out. ask any epidemiologist or scientist and they will tell you: it’s arrival, if it’s a successful strain, is INEVITABLE.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/video/u … t-81442511
US braces for 'inevitable' arrival of omicron variant

https://amp.9news.com.au/article/8da498 … ff15dc2d7d
New COVID-19 variants 'inevitable', says Perrottet after arrivals from southern Africa test positive

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/ … ads-europe
prof chris whitty told the press conference is was ‘inevitable’ …

we have zero ability to shut down highly infectious new variants. that’s the reality. nothing short of restricting human travel forever, and/or performing lab sequencing on every single positive detected case ever, is going to keep this thing to a highly localised and limited affair. to deny this is simply childish. all you can seem to retort to it seems to be ‘we must start a war on china’. ok boomer.  let the adult scientists do the talking.

in the event, a highly contagious new variant could nudge off a few sluggish-yet-deadly variants. you assuming that every new mutation is a ‘vaccine beater’ or a ‘pandemic reset’ is your own fear, not the scientific data.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 20:17:34)

delta wasn't the fourth variant though, was it? it was the fourth major variant of concern. there were literally hundreds of variants with 'potentially threatening' mutations in the last 2 years that went nowhere, or were superseded.

in your head it's like a disaster-movie or a marvel movie or something. 'each new variant is a bigger and worser villain than the last!' except that's literally not how it has played out. at all. but good job in your sensationalized narrative of events, i guess. 'omicron must be bad because it follows delta, actually it's 11 letters on in the greek alphabet from delta, so we know it's really really bad'.

the fact that the first 3 major variants all originated in totally different continents, thousands of miles from one another, should probably help you to understand that they were not 'iterative' or 'improvements' on the antecedent variation(s), dilbert. that's because the story of '4 variants' is a newspaper construction, not the actual history of the pandemic. there have been 100s if not 1000s of variants which, over time, have resolved into several major 'waves' of more successful variants.

evidently you don't have a very good grasp on the actual pandemic from gleaning news headlines only. you are thick as mince.

If it were going to become less transmissible and less lethal wouldn't it have started to happen by now?

i mean, do you literally understand how natural selection works at all, you god-brained self-nominated scientist-type? the virus isn't 'evolving' to get more deadly to humans. genetic variation between generations is an inevitability, not some pre-ordained process of refinement with 'killing humans' as the ultimate, god-directed goal.

"if it was going to become massively more lethal, wouldn't it have happened by now?" apply your own ridiculously insufficient understanding of the basics of natural selection, dilbert. i honestly can't help you if you can't do high-school biology. it has simultaneously become more/less transmissible/lethal throughout the entire history of the pandemc. you just don't read about the umpteen numbers of small variation clusters that rise and fall in the space of weeks/months.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-29 21:18:43)