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Forums - General Discussion - Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

A lockdown is never the problem. The problem is lacking financial reimbursements. The lockdown itself is causing very few problems, the missing financial aid is what's causing the big problems. But that's what you get when people continuously vote for gutting the welfare system and develop a hate culture against poor people and then suddenly a lockdown becomes necessary and people freak out.

Maybe instead of people fighting against lockdowns they should instead fight against a state where losing your job means literally dying.



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SvennoJ said:

The initial problem was also trust. There was a shortage of masks, first responders needed them, yet confiscating shipments and forcing factories to produce for the government only is another thing we can't do here. We can't stop scalpers either, hoarding was a big problem at the start and was more dangerous than the pandemic itself.

At first it was widely believed that the main path of transmission was from surfaces and touching people. That the main pathway is through the air took a long time to be recognized and still isn't really. A reason why I don't trust the back to school stuff, lack of ventilation measures. But when you believe the virus transmits through surfaces and touch, whole social distancing doesn't make much sense.

It's the world we live in nowadays. The government doesn't trust the people and vice versa. Both continually show they can't be trusted. I don't know the answer to that. Initial screw ups are unavoidable with a new unknown disease (unlike making a game) and the biggest problem was not trusting the Chinese data and recommendations. It took way too long to figure out how much more vulnerable older people are and many were sentenced to death by closing schools in Italy, getting the grandparents to take care of the kids while the parents continued working. Here it exposed the shortcomings of our elderly homes, although shortcomings is an understatement.

It's been almost a year now. Currently we do have a good grasp on what works and what doesn't. Yet how do you convince people? My sister still believes masks are completely pointless, since numbers went up in the Netherlands despite people using masks.

Perhaps it's the result of poor education standards. How much did you get here in school about probabilities, exponential spread, growth factors, pandemics, etc. We did get the math part in school but never in relation to biology and pandemics. In biology we did look at bacterial growth but not at viral spread. R0, never heard of that before this all started. In history we did learn about the Black plague and Spanish flu. But nothing connected all the dots, all separate things, taught in different years.

(Btw the online schooling is a joke, it just teaches my kids to let the computer do the work for them. My wife caught our 9 year old copy pasting text he was supposed to read into a text to speech thingie from windows, let the computer read it to him. Then dictate his summary to one note instead of writing or simply copy paste parts. Crafty buggers)

SvennoJ said:

I wonder how it will go next week. It just came out that everyone has to stay home from the 24th, basically Christmas is cancelled.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-will-enter-province-wide-lockdown-as-of-christmas-eve-sources-say-1.5239437

These sources, who have direct knowledge of the situation, say the lockdown will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24 and will last for 28 days in the southern portions of the province and 14 days in the northern parts.

This lockdown will look similar to the province-wide shutdown back in March, with only essential businesses being allowed to remain open.

The sources say this decision was made based off COVID-19 modelling data. The data has shown that under any scenario, Ontario will see 300 people in intensive care by the end of December. At the current rate of transmission, that number would grow to 700 patients by the end of January.

The province has said that once the number of COVID-19 patients in Ontario’s intensive care units (ICU) surpasses 300 supporting other medical needs not related to the disease becomes nearly impossible. There are currently 261 patients infected with the disease in ICUs across the province.

So basically they did F all to increase capacity, 300 ICU beds is the limit for nearly 15 million population in Ontario.


I hope they get our roof finished before Thursday. It would suck if that gets cut off since by the end of the lock down we'll be in the middle of winter. They were working on it today, aiming to be done on Tuesday if the weather cooperates.

Ya trust in general was a problem to begin with. It's near impossible to make meaningful progress if that's where you're starting from.

Early on you'd have to be a little more cautious if you aren't sure what's going on exactly. We did know people weren't dropping like flies, so a lockdown didn't make sense, but masks would've been quite a minor ask, and social distancing, a little more so, though still not anywhere near lockdown. You want to be ahead of the game but you also can't go overboard or you'll get what we've gotten now where people can't be bothered.

Pretty sure we can force industry to change for war if it's bad enough. Maybe in this case it wasn't deemed a big enough emergency or it's flat out illegal. Then have the Gov subsidize the manufacturing to a degree and have the Gov distribute them as directly as possible. The U.S. incentivized biz I believe.

Our education system sucks, even prior to the lockdowns. It doesn't teach much of what should be taught, and more importantly, teaches kids to memorize and repeat instead of to think critically and be creative. We want intelligent humans, not dumb robots, especially in situations like pandemics.

Saw this lockdown coming a mile away. So did the people who flooded the stores recently, some hoarding.

First lockdown was a little bit before Easter. The rest of the time just restrictions, heavy or light, even Thanksgiving. Now another lockdown right before Christmas. Covid must be the devils work...

28 Days Later. Again. Maybe it's time to give it a watch.



EricHiggin said:

Ya trust in general was a problem to begin with. It's near impossible to make meaningful progress if that's where you're starting from.

Early on you'd have to be a little more cautious if you aren't sure what's going on exactly. We did know people weren't dropping like flies, so a lockdown didn't make sense, but masks would've been quite a minor ask, and social distancing, a little more so, though still not anywhere near lockdown. You want to be ahead of the game but you also can't go overboard or you'll get what we've gotten now where people can't be bothered.

Pretty sure we can force industry to change for war if it's bad enough. Maybe in this case it wasn't deemed a big enough emergency or it's flat out illegal. Then have the Gov subsidize the manufacturing to a degree and have the Gov distribute them as directly as possible. The U.S. incentivized biz I believe.

Our education system sucks, even prior to the lockdowns. It doesn't teach much of what should be taught, and more importantly, teaches kids to memorize and repeat instead of to think critically and be creative. We want intelligent humans, not dumb robots, especially in situations like pandemics.

Saw this lockdown coming a mile away. So did the people who flooded the stores recently, some hoarding.

First lockdown was a little bit before Easter. The rest of the time just restrictions, heavy or light, even Thanksgiving. Now another lockdown right before Christmas. Covid must be the devils work...

28 Days Later. Again. Maybe it's time to give it a watch.

Fun movie. I just got Tenet in, I'll be giving that a watch soon. Next is not a bad show atm, inspired by Covid-19 no doubt. It's all nonsense, yet I'm running out of Netflix stuff to watch. Currently watching some Japanese show, welcome to borderland, which popped up a couple days ago. (Don't try with English dub, horrible)

To tell you how much the system sucks... One of the kids in my youngest's class is currently stuck in India (father critically ill in hospital). He has to do online learning from there in the middle of the night. Last week the teacher was literally yelling at this kid for a long time for not doing the assignments right (no one can find). We get that you're stressed out as well and there is no help, but this is terrible behavior. It's been getting worse, she went off on the class nearly every day last week (sometimes for hours), glad it's holiday break now. My wife now turns on the camera and stares at her so she'll cut it out knowing an adult is watching. So basically, the online part (mandatory have to be online) is more distracting than useful. My kids hate it.

It wreaks havoc on kids. Best friend of my oldest is now coping with severe depression. His mother (single mother) pushed him back in school, despite being severely immuno comprimised herself, afraid he might do something to himself (he needs to be among other kids). Luckily it helped a bit and he was 'well enough' today to play with my oldest again (online). (He was getting depressed as well since his friend didn't want to talk to anyone anymore)

My kids are also sick of each other, this is going to be a trying 28 days without their separate sleep overs at the grand parents.

Silver lining, they do learn how to figure things out on computers.



As for the early lock down. It was understandable. People weren't dropping like flies here (looking back the daily death toll was higher than it is currently, was in the 60s at the end of April) yet Italy was showing dreadful images of what happens when you take measures too late, and more importantly, how fast it can escalate. Now with social distancing and masks it's moving up much slower at least.

People get bored easily, also a result of sensationalizing everything. The media and advertisers can be thanked for that.



A less conspiracy view on the new strain (what was that second part of that video....)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/what-we-know-about-the-u-k-s-new-novel-coronavirus-variant-1.5239317
- over 70% more transmissible (hence becoming visible, taking over)
- "doesn’t seem to make it necessarily worse in terms of infection but it may make it worse in terms of transmission"
- "no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments although urgent work is underway to confirm this,”
- “the expectation is that vaccines stimulate a broad antibody response. So they (the vaccines) are triggering a response to the entire spike protein, so if we have mutations in some regions (of the DNA), it doesn’t seem like that would reduce the efficacy of the vaccine in a particularly significant way.” But she stressed changes to vaccine efficacy “wasn’t completely implausible.”

Isn't this at least the second time a seemingly more contagious strain variant takes over? Natural selection also favors asymptomatic transmission, unnoticed (less damaging) transmission gets free reign, while people with symptoms isolate. The reason this virus is so hard to get rid of is because it's not all that deadly and doesn't severely affect most people.

A less damaging, more infectious strain can actually help build up herd immunity. However there are no signs either that it is less damaging.



In other news.....Covid-19 has mutated once again......this time in the UK....and nobody knows if the newly approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are effective against it.

Great. Wonderful news. Say hello to 2021.



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Nighthawk117 said:

In other news.....Covid-19 has mutated once again......this time in the UK....and nobody knows if the newly approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are effective against it.

Great. Wonderful news. Say hello to 2021.

While it is a cause for concern, we shouldn't panic about this.

Apparently it's highly likely existing vaccines will still work against it, and even if it does mutate to evade them, now that we have a working base vaccine it is easy to tweak it to account for new mutations, just like we do for seasonal flu.



LurkerJ said:

4-years-old video. The topic of debt forgiveness isn't new, the fact that there is no real push to make it happen during this pandemic is insanity, it's not even a discussed topic in a national or international stage. 

I don't blame anyone for having a fuck all attitude. From being lied to about masks at the beginning of the pandemic to continuously asking people to do things and get nothing in return but the promise of temporary lifting of restrictions. Erm, hello?

I have personally grown richer during this pandemic but one can't ignore the fact that big businesses are being looked after and the common man is asked to obey and get blamed for everything by someone as obnoxious and ugly as Fauci. 

Yes. Let's not forget it was a lie from WHO, on purpose, and media and politicians supported it although it was clear it made no sense. Just like Cyberpunk release.

Trust science, but only the ones chosen by the media. Dont EVER question the decisions or you will be a theory conspiracist. DO NOT look independently for data or facts, even the ones provided by government agencies. Do not study finance so you dont question the consequence of all the money printing. Actually thinking there is a limit for all the money printing and government support without causing huge consequences for the world economy is a conspiracy. If something does not make sense there is probably because you are not trusting the media and science enough. Just accept everything and be happy, forget about your family, and stay home until further notice, probably at least 3 years. If the vaccines are able to properly work on all the virus mutations.

As for myself I'm alright, me and my wife work in areas not impacted by all the madness, we live in a comfortable house and working from home made me save a lot of money. At least I was able to buy an XSX which is good I guess.



SvennoJ said:

A less conspiracy view on the new strain (what was that second part of that video....)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/what-we-know-about-the-u-k-s-new-novel-coronavirus-variant-1.5239317
- over 70% more transmissible (hence becoming visible, taking over)
- "doesn’t seem to make it necessarily worse in terms of infection but it may make it worse in terms of transmission"
- "no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments although urgent work is underway to confirm this,”
- “the expectation is that vaccines stimulate a broad antibody response. So they (the vaccines) are triggering a response to the entire spike protein, so if we have mutations in some regions (of the DNA), it doesn’t seem like that would reduce the efficacy of the vaccine in a particularly significant way.” But she stressed changes to vaccine efficacy “wasn’t completely implausible.”

Isn't this at least the second time a seemingly more contagious strain variant takes over? Natural selection also favors asymptomatic transmission, unnoticed (less damaging) transmission gets free reign, while people with symptoms isolate. The reason this virus is so hard to get rid of is because it's not all that deadly and doesn't severely affect most people.

A less damaging, more infectious strain can actually help build up herd immunity. However there are no signs either that it is less damaging.

This is my biggest fear, that the vaccines get impacted by mutation on the virus. It seems that as long as the mutations are not located in the protein receptors, which is what the vaccines target then we should be ok. Anyway, this vaccine will probably be "season flu" vaccine style, updated every year with the new strains of the virus. Let's keep fingers crossed.



We should not forget that the first vaccines aren't the only solution. There are more vaccines that work differently and therapies as well. So even in the worst case scenario that the first vaccines become completely ineffective it' still gonna be better than before the vaccines.

If the vaccines are impacted we should also see massive waves of reinfection, which hasn't happened yet.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

Nighthawk117 said:

In other news.....Covid-19 has mutated once again......this time in the UK....and nobody knows if the newly approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are effective against it.

Great. Wonderful news. Say hello to 2021.

People should've known better... Covid is basically conscious in how it decides when, where, and who to infect, which is why we need the odd, everchanging restrictions and lockdowns put in place. Do people really think it wouldn't instantly mutate once a vaccine showed up to end it?..