Coronavirus: COVID-19

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Chips
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Chips » Sun, 18. Jul 21, 12:11

mr.WHO wrote:
Tue, 13. Jul 21, 12:43

The Long SARS was well studies and it wasn't out of ordinaty to have symptoms up to 3-6 months (including temporary changes in lungs). Only Most sever cases were above 12 months and having pernament dammage is like winning a lotery (I think there was only a dozen or two dozen cases out of all SARS cases).
For someone who seems so focussed upon numbers and statistics, the idea that a dozen or two cases in... was it 9000 cases of the virus in total (SARS), is like "winning the lottery" (where odds of winning the jackpot I assume, are usually in the tens or hundreds of millions to 1), is only slightly less amusing statistical voodoo than seeing you critique a lack of statistics followed by misuse of figures when you have them in subsequent posts (though you do eventually realise). Does highlight a very soft version of the risk with people grabbing and (mis)using data though.

Anyhow, apparently the UK has a new trial - so that instead of isolating after being notified you've been in contact with someone who's got Covid, you can instead submit daily tests in order to continue working (out of work, you must self isolate still). The headline article is undoubtedly going to be read by many who don't then read the article and just see "they won't self isolate". Wonder what'll happen with that!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57877373

Oh look, a u-turn on that one. I didn't even get to click post before it happened.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57879730

Perhaps someone somewhere pointed out the "Do as I say, not as I do" is not the way to go for leadership...

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by BaronVerde » Sun, 18. Jul 21, 12:39

Those idiots lack the personality to lead. They're utterly inapt for the job.

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exogenesis
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by exogenesis » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 00:35

Looking back to the so-called 'Great UK Covid Clean-out of 2021',
it looks like that on one specific day, when daily cases of viral infection were soaring (again) & with follow-on deaths rising,
the UK decided it was the ideal time to remove mandatory restrictions (these were social measures designed to minimise infection),
& allow a return to normal social interactions, after a period of more than a year of what was then termed 'lock down'.

With the world watching, it seemed for a while as if things were under control,
and many countries unfortunately then followed suit.

Despite a strong vaccination program, where at least 75% of the UK population had been innoculated,
overall it was a disaster for the UK, population & economy wise.
Mostly this was caused by multiple resurgence of infection due to viral mutations.

After the UK mostly recovered some 10 years later it was decided that these decisions
could no longer be left purely in the hands of politicians,
but based on a fully independant medical & science led commitee, with national powers.

On a somewhat positive side, at the time, the reduction in the weak & vunerable members of the UK
somewhat strengthened the population, just allowing those people who could cope with with the viral infection to survive,
leading to a healthier average state.

Now several decades later, with the looming threat of the world-wide pandemic of 'Monkey Virus J-23',
can we expect these historical lessons will help us ?
We can only hope.




Please tell me we're not really going to do this,
are we ?

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by pjknibbs » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 07:44

I think that's a little bit "the sky is falling", exogenesis. For a start, the deaths at the moment aren't really tracking the number of cases. Just compare now with January--back then, we had about the same number of cases but the deaths were thousands a day, now, it's double digits.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Gavrushka » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 13:21

I feel it was a mistake to remove compulsory mask wearing, but not of removing other restrictions. Mask wearing was made a legal requirement *because* it is a way of helping protect others from an infection the wearer might have. - Thing is, those who aren't concerned with the wellbeing of others aren't gonna give a stuff now it's optional whereas the more empathic will do the 'right thing' regardless.

As someone on Twitter wrote just a few hours ago:
Joanne Harris wrote:If your freedom limits the freedom of others, then it was never “freedom” at all.
There may be those who will now try and justify why it's okay not to wear masks in shops, on transport or wherever there are people gathered together, but short of those with medical exemptions, the reason is because they don't care enough about the wellbeing of others.

And, the thing is, that's just the way the world is, and why we need laws. Some people will do the right thing because it's the right thing, whereas others do it reluctantly because 'consequences.'
“Man, my poor head is battered,” Ed said.

“That explains its unusual shape,” Styanar said, grinning openly now. “Although it does little to illuminate just why your jowls are so flaccid or why you have quite so many chins.”

“I…” Had she just called him fat? “I am just a different species, that’s all.”

“Well nature sure does have a sense of humour then,” Styanar said. “Shall we go inside? It’d not be a good idea for me to be spotted by others.”

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by mr.WHO » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 16:43

In Poland we have outdoor mask lifted over month ago, while still retaining indoor mask (e.g. public transport, shopping malls).
In my city (population circa 800k) we already had mass outdoor events, like Beer festival a month ago (thousands of people for 3 days with nearly nobody wearing a mask), while indoor events are still limited to 50% capacity and rather infrequent comparing to pre-covid times.
Two weeks ago we had an outdoor Food festival with similar numbers of participants and I can atest there was no social distancing and masking was in name only (you can't eat in mask).
So far the numbers are kept steady and for over two weeks we have ~100 new cases and ~10 deaths for entire country. Numbers of hospitalizations is steady around 500 and there is only 2-3 days lag in tracking. I'd expect that these would be the numbers for my city alone, not the whole country.

IMO, at least in Poland case it might be that during summer time we stay longer in outdoor activity and the cities are less densly populated, so transmission chain is somewhat limited naturally.

According to this one, on weekly trends, we have +9% of cases and -28% deaths, so vacinees are starting to kick in well.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... ekly_table

I'd say the crucial part of mask mandate is focus on indoor and that's what I intend to do even if all mask mandates would be lifted.
I already see that barely 1 out of 10 person wear mask outdoor, but it's around 9 out of 10 wearing one indoors (and I count incorrect wearing, with nose sticking out as no mask).

Everyone expect new wave around September/October when people will get back to mainly indoor activities.


BTW I'd argue if we should count a busy street in the middle of London (or any other huge city) as "outdoor" - IMO, in such case, I'd probably still wear a mask.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 19:48

I'm still wondering what I'll do if somebody I don't know at all gets too close to me (indoors or outdoors) and either sneezes or coughs in my direction without properly covering it up. I think I will be quite worried and very annoyed.
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by mr.WHO » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 20:40

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 19. Jul 21, 19:48
I'm still wondering what I'll do if somebody I don't know at all gets too close to me (indoors or outdoors) and either sneezes or coughs in my direction without properly covering it up. I think I will be quite worried and very annoyed.
Actually, yesterday I was riding a bike and stopped next to badly coughing person. I'm vacinated for over a month, but it was still a bit displeasing - it could be flu, it could be COVID, or it could be tuberculosis.
You will have to get accustom to it or never again go outside of your home. Albleit, I always tried to stay away from coughing people ever since I watched Contagion, so it's nothing new for me.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Tamina » Mon, 19. Jul 21, 20:53

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 19. Jul 21, 19:48
I'm still wondering what I'll do if somebody I don't know at all gets too close to me (indoors or outdoors) and either sneezes or coughs in my direction without properly covering it up. I think I will be quite worried and very annoyed.
So Corona hasn't changed anything in that regard? :D

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by fiksal » Mon, 26. Jul 21, 13:57

What an unpleasant second shot for me was. But it's done.


On a related note, majority of Russians I know are not vaccinated on purpose. The ones living in Russia I can forgive, because I myself cant make sense out of the vaccine quality over there. The ones living not in Russia, I feel I must limit interactions with.

One specifically said yesterday that he would've gotten many vaccines if he'd think COVID was real.

Gavrushka wrote:
Mon, 19. Jul 21, 13:21
I feel it was a mistake to remove compulsory mask wearing, but not of removing other restrictions. Mask wearing was made a legal requirement *because* it is a way of helping protect others from an infection the wearer might have. - Thing is, those who aren't concerned with the wellbeing of others aren't gonna give a stuff now it's optional whereas the more empathic will do the 'right thing' regardless.

As someone on Twitter wrote just a few hours ago:
Joanne Harris wrote:If your freedom limits the freedom of others, then it was never “freedom” at all.
There may be those who will now try and justify why it's okay not to wear masks in shops, on transport or wherever there are people gathered together, but short of those with medical exemptions, the reason is because they don't care enough about the wellbeing of others.

And, the thing is, that's just the way the world is, and why we need laws. Some people will do the right thing because it's the right thing, whereas others do it reluctantly because 'consequences.'

Indeed. Those who arent concerned, arent vaccinated didnt wear the mask properly half the time, but they would wear it right occasionally on pure accident.

We still have them mandatory till September at least.
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by felter » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 00:29

Have to say this, I watched a video earlier on about Americans who refuse the Covid vaccine. Part of it was in a town hall meeting situation with maybe 50 to a 100 attendees one of them says the reason she refuses to take the vaccine is that it has not been tested and is unproven, I take it by the unproven she was saying that it had not been proven to actually work, how much testing do they want to be done how many have taken the vaccines worldwide certainly over a billion that's a fair amount for to say it's not been tested as for it not been proven the results speak for themselves on that.

Then there is this other women, I would say probably in her 80s, she says I don't take any vaccines, I will just social distance. She said this with a straight face after she had spent a long time indoors with those 50 to 100 others of all ages, from young to old, and none of them wearing a mask while also given an interview without wearing a mask. Honestly, social distancing, my ass. There is clueless and then there are these people.

I don't know where they are getting their information from, but they need to get it from somewhere else. It does just show the mentality of these people, they are either idiots or just pure dumb as they come. I wouldn't want to wish the Covid virus on anyone, but these people more than deserve to catch it, and it would be pretty funny if they caught it from that meeting.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by CBJ » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 11:37

felter wrote:
Sat, 31. Jul 21, 00:29
... they are either idiots or just pure dumb as they come.
There may be an element of this in some cases, but we should also remember that they are also victims of an insidious campaign of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies. We can argue over the motivations for that campaign and who is responsible (it's unlikely to be just one person, group or reason), but we should all at least be able to agree that the most important lesson for the future is that we need to find a way to prevent millions of people from being sucked into the kind of alternate reality that leads them to put their own lives, and those of their families, friends and neighbours, at serious risk for completely spurious reasons.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by red assassin » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 11:58

CBJ wrote:
Sat, 31. Jul 21, 11:37
There may be an element of this in some cases, but we should also remember that they are also victims of an insidious campaign of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies. We can argue over the motivations for that campaign and who is responsible (it's unlikely to be just one person, group or reason), but we should all at least be able to agree that the most important lesson for the future is that we need to find a way to prevent millions of people from being sucked into the kind of alternate reality that leads them to put their own lives, and those of their families, friends and neighbours, at risk for completely spurious reasons.
Yes, it's important to recognise that the recruitment process for anti-vax groups is not by any means dissimilar from that of cults, terrorist groups, and other insular extra-social groups. It starts with exploiting very natural seeds of doubt in the face of a scary and complex situation, and offers community and certainty. It is deliberately incredibly psychologically challenging to leave once you've started down that path. Any conflicting information is not just further information to be considered, it is an orchestrated malicious attack designed to harm you and your family. Of course, public health efforts to shut down misinformation are used to feed this: they just don't want you to know the truth! And the weird language that anti-vax groups use is at once a necessity to evade "censorship" and a community reinforcement. Any expression of deviancy from the party line is punished by the in-group, no matter how minor. Leaving requires that you give up the safety of the community and the entire associated belief system in one go. Of course the more extreme anti-vax ideas like "the vaccine literally kills everybody who takes it" are obviously nonsense taken in isolation and there are few people who'd accept that in isolation. But it isn't taken in isolation; ideas like that come at the end of a long process and rejecting that idea requires that you reject everything else in one giant psychological leap as well.

The good news is that evidence tends to suggest that if you actually successfully shut off the flow of misinformation on major platforms, the groups tend to collapse and the relatively small number of individuals who originate a lot of this stuff tend to become irrelevant: without the constant self-reinforcement, these beliefs don't endure very well. But of course, actually expunging all of this material from all the major social networks and many major news networks is extremely hard.
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Vertigo 7 » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 15:34

red assassin wrote:
Sat, 31. Jul 21, 11:58
The good news is that evidence tends to suggest that if you actually successfully shut off the flow of misinformation on major platforms, the groups tend to collapse and the relatively small number of individuals who originate a lot of this stuff tend to become irrelevant: without the constant self-reinforcement, these beliefs don't endure very well. But of course, actually expunging all of this material from all the major social networks and many major news networks is extremely hard.
Until Faux News is taken off the air, the primary distribution platform of that misinformation is going to thrive. Otoh, I'm having a really hard time giving a damn if their target audience gets a lesson in Darwinism first hand.
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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 16:12

Sure, many of those contemporaries have their problems with natural science. It is out of their mental scope, just like religion is out of mine :D

And, just between us, Darwinism sensu strictu is as outdated (or half a century more outdated) as for instance Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, if you get my drift :-) ~160 years have passed since "The Origin of Species", science has moved on. It'l take months or years to explain our modern day understanding of biological evolution to guys like Darwin, Wallace, and whomnot.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by mr.WHO » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 08:11

I think that with already vacinated significant portion of the population, it would be good idea to start allow pople to choose their vacine:
1) The peculiar side affects or dangers are often for only one vacine and not for others.
2) AZ and J&J are "classic" vacines - if for some reason, people do not trust mRNA vacines.


To my suprise and this in unitended, in Poland you're already able to choose between:
1) If you officially register you get randomly selected vacine (most probably the two doze ones as J&J is almost exclusive for fast vacination points)
2) If you live in big city or on vacation, there are mobile vacination point, where you can get J&J without pre-registering


I myself got J&J, but it's due to lazyness - J&J was single dose and it took me like 20 minutes to get all paperwork process, while in normal registration, it had two weeks wait time for first doze and month wait between dozes.
Now you can pretty much register for a next day, but I still think J&J is more convinient and fast (You're fully protected before the time you would get a 2nd doze with 2 doze vacine).

Edit: Seems like EU just orderd 200 milion Novavax vacine, so soon there will be another option for "classic" vacine.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Chips » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 18:02

Every week there are stories in the media of yet another "fit, young, healthy adult wishes they'd believed in covid and taken the vaccine as they die in hospital". I don't think I'm ever going to understand those people... (some do believe in covid, just didn't think they'd get it. Or if they did, they'd be okay).

Then again at age 17 I did 100 miles an hour on the motorway in a rusty Ford Orion diesel - which vibrated as if it were mid-earthquake past 95mph and the dash shook violently at 100. Not once did i think "if anything goes wrong i'm dead", just slowed down a bit. Car was a death trap.

Usually I don't think that people making bad decisions imply that they're necessarily stupid. Incredibly intelligent people make bad decisions all the time.

But given the volume of evidence - media coverage, stories of those dying years before "their time" (as they say), and all because they didn't get vaccinated despite having the chance, the continued refusal to get vaccinated is baffling. Face palm moments every single time you have to read about another one, especially leaving behind children/partners who have to soldier on without them. For the sake of what?
BaronVerde wrote:
Sat, 31. Jul 21, 16:12
sensu strictu
:roll:

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by BaronVerde » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 19:41

Yep, rolleyes :-)

I used the term to make clear I referred to Darwin's contribution to our view of evolution by introducing natural selection, while he at the same time was not aware of for instance genes and inheritance a la Mendel. Though Darwin observed and described ratios similiar to Mendel, I believe he didn't know of Mendels work, at least not when he published his seminal "On the Origin of Species". And anyway, biological evolution has become such a huge apparatus including geology, geography, chemisry, biology, genetics, math and statistics, that I deemed it necessary to point out that Darwin and Darwinism (sensu stricto :P) is just a small step for a human :-) to make when trying to understand biological evolution.

It is also, if I am not mistaken, the case specifically in 'murrica that "Darwinism" is frequently instrumentalized and has some eschatological connotation to it, like a belief, or some such ... One more reason to make clear "I mean natural selection a la Darwin, 1859".

------------------

Read today a random news item that intelligence people have hacked Chinese lab data and are now trying to find something to hang around the Chinese necks, but that they lack capable scientists to correctly interpret the data. <opinon> Bloody intelligence derps, should rather be helpful finding solutions than searching for culprits </opinion>.

Whatever :-)

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by Tamina » Sat, 7. Aug 21, 22:41

Got my second shot two days ago. I am a bit late to the party but if you want a specific vaccine here, then you have to make an appointment and I wanted Biontech. For the same reason most Brits are probably going for AstraZeneca in England, blindly guessing.

First shot: Pain in the arm
Second shot: Nothing

The vaccination center was almost empty, though. Which is kind of sad to see. Seems like Germany is going to settle for a ~60-70% vaccination rate as well from my very little experience. Politicians said there will be no forced vaccination - we will see about that.

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Re: Coronavirus: COVID-19

Post by fiksal » Sun, 8. Aug 21, 05:06

my next challenge is what we advice to our relatives, that live in Russia, about the Russian vaccines.

does the risk behind the questionably tested (or rather untested) vaccine make sense?
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