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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
You think that's bad...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/tired-mum-named-shamed-facebook-18143150.amp

Burn the heretic.

Hang on, did you just equate the potential attempted murder of a doctor for criticising the Russian government to a woman being criticised by some idiots for not joining in with the clapping?

It's called satire.

This thread has become a massive pathetic ego tripping joke...
Its so hard to find any relevant useful posts between the waves of garbage bickering

 ValentineGames wrote:
This thread has become a massive pathetic ego tripping joke...
Its so hard to find any relevant useful posts between the waves of garbage bickering

Very true , but perhaps not the best place to look for relevant info on covid 19.

Marxist artist wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
This thread has become a massive pathetic ego tripping joke...
Its so hard to find any relevant useful posts between the waves of garbage bickering

Very true , but perhaps not the best place to look for relevant info on covid 19.

Now that is definitely true

 ValentineGames wrote:
This thread has become a massive pathetic ego tripping joke...
Its so hard to find any relevant useful posts between the waves of garbage bickering

You misspelled "human society" as "this thread".

Guys, please. This thread is beginning to remind me of the scene in every zombie movie where the zombies are pounding on the doors and the humans and all fighting each other.

Can we act a little smarter than the cast of morons that get eaten in every zombie movie?

Love him or hate him, Bill Maher always has something to say and often has some valid points.

Here's his thoughts on covid and the reactions to it. NSFW.

https://youtu.be/28I5WyLp15o

In my opinion he raised a point. Maybe a lot of people have less than optimum immune systems. Poor diet, environmental factors, whatever.

Is there something we can do about that? A real nutrient or vitamin supplement that enhances the immune system? Maybe something that can occasionally be given to people to give their immune systems a combat drill? Really, some sort of mix of benign virus and bacteria you take like say twice a year that just gives your immune system a fake invasion to fight off and keep it on it's toes? Not a specific vaccine, just a kind of fake assault to stimulate it in general, in addition to flue shots of course.

As an idea I just had, maybe we could take new or mutation prone viruses that are not dangrous yet and use safe versions of these as part of an annual general immunosystem workout to give people's immune systems exposure to these viruses in a non dangerous form so if one mutates into a kliller maybe, jut maybe, their immune systems already have a jump on it/ Again, not a doctor, I almost became a physicist but not a physician. I don't know if this is a good idea, I'm putting it out for discussion. Maybe if'd we'd been exposed to a non harmful version of this virus earlier we might have some immunity in our populace before it went killer. Maybe not, as we need updates on the flu every year. Just something to look at in the light of this epidemic, we might want to re evaluate our thoughts on preparedness and cost vs risk.

meantime, can we remember what the real enemy is? Here, just a reminder:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
You think that's bad...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/tired-mum-named-shamed-facebook-18143150.amp

Burn the heretic.

Hang on, did you just equate the potential attempted murder of a doctor for criticising the Russian government to a woman being criticised by some idiots for not joining in with the clapping?

It's called satire.

It can be hard to read sarcasm in text form, I would cut some slack to anyone who misinterprets. Though I will add both incidents are indeed bad, but the Russian one is actual authoritarian activity. Unfortunate, but IMO not an escalation of how Putin has run things for some time.

If you don't have something useful to add to this thread, please just don't post. Obviously, there is a lot of noise regarding COVID-19 in general, and people definitely shouldn't be getting their news on the pandemic here.

But we'd like to try to keep this thread open for discussion if possible, since it's such a huge issue and relevant to absolutely everyone. If there is a problem, please hit the mod alert button or PM any moderator, rather than responding "in kind" (or off topic) in the thread.

Thanks all...

As an additional suggestion, I'd like to ask folks to consider using the ignore function (or just not responding) if you find you've gone in circles with another poster in this thread who you just don't agree with. That way we can avoid personal back-and-forth, and focus on the larger topic we'd all like to discuss.

Responding to Matt; a huge benefit to people's health which could realistically be done is additional nutrient intake via genetically engineered crops. Genetically engineering staple foods like rice to have additional vitamins allows the improvement of people's diets without them doing anything differently (as they will still be growing the same crop they always have). This extends into another of other areas like pollution, pesticide use, and land degradation, but those are outside the scope of this thread.

Just by ensuring people have better vitamin intake we can improve overall health dramatically. Unfortunately there is a lot of pushback against GMO food, most of it baseless but some from real economic problems, which needs to be dealt with. It also runs into the classic issue with long term solutions; nutrition will not address the problems with coronavirus right now.

As for exposing people to a 'fake' enemy to keep the immune system in fighting form, that is more or less what vaccines do. In a larger picture there is an issue with over sanitation that has a negative impact on the immune systems of people in first world countries (not to mention the auto-immune conditions that arise) but that is again something that is a long-term matter.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Responding to Matt; a huge benefit to people's health which could realistically be done is additional nutrient intake via genetically engineered crops. Genetically engineering staple foods like rice to have additional vitamins allows the improvement of people's diets without them doing anything differently (as they will still be growing the same crop they always have). This extends into another of other areas like pollution, pesticide use, and land degradation, but those are outside the scope of this thread.

Just by ensuring people have better vitamin intake we can improve overall health dramatically. Unfortunately there is a lot of pushback against GMO food, most of it baseless but some from real economic problems, which needs to be dealt with. It also runs into the classic issue with long term solutions; nutrition will not address the problems with coronavirus right now.

As for exposing people to a 'fake' enemy to keep the immune system in fighting form, that is more or less what vaccines do. In a larger picture there is an issue with over sanitation that has a negative impact on the immune systems of people in first world countries (not to mention the auto-immune conditions that arise) but that is again something that is a long-term matter.

Oh yes I knew vaccines worked that way, what I'm thinking os sort of a generic mix of things that would not just key the immune system up for one thing but just give it a workout in general. Also, possibly exposing people to stuff that is not dangerous YET but could possibly mutate into a killer form.
Vaccines are like training against one specific enemy. Once in a while a good old general combat drill might help too. Maybe, I don't know.

BTW I think I'm starting to like you.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
um? if you say so? if youre going on number of customers as an indicator of a restaurant or pubs quality, then wetherspoons and mcdonalds would be the countrys best establishments

Sorry, I wasn't clear, I was just having a little joke. Hard to convey context in text sometimes.

To bring this back on toipic...

I don't know about santa clause, but yes, virginia, there are good people left in the world.

Nvidia's top scientist just designed an easy to build emergency ventilator to save corona victim's lives and has made the plans open source. Estimated cost in about 400 USD. He will not make a profit from this.

Make me proud to have a geforce 1660 in my battlestation.

https://www.cnet.com/news/nvidias-chief-scientist-designs-a-cheap-ventilator-to-help-fight-covid-19/

That is really cool to see.

After the UK government 'met' their 100,000 tests per day target on Thursday (by counting 40,000 test kits that they dispatched to testing centres) they've subsequently fallen to ca. 70k on Friday, 60k on Saturday, and about 50k yesterday.

And some of the tests they sent don't even work reliably.

nfe wrote:
After the UK government 'met' their 100,000 tests per day target on Thursday (by counting 40,000 test kits that they dispatched to testing centres) they've subsequently fallen to ca. 70k on Friday, 60k on Saturday, and about 50k yesterday.

honest question, are we surprised?

Only surprise is people are stupid enough to not make bigger noice and instead are letting them get away with that. But then again maybe that's not too much of a surprise either.

And something corona has shown. If there comes high mortality rate high infection rate pandemic humans are well and truly screwed. People won't obey lockdowns and countries will be reopening too soon because of economy concerns. Money is the king.

Not Online!!! wrote:

nfe wrote:
After the UK government 'met' their 100,000 tests per day target on Thursday (by counting 40,000 test kits that they dispatched to testing centres) they've subsequently fallen to ca. 70k on Friday, 60k on Saturday, and about 50k yesterday.

honest question, are we surprised?

No.

tneva82 wrote:Only surprise is people are stupid enough to not make bigger noice and instead are letting them get away with that. But then again maybe that's not too much of a surprise either.

To be fair, those that aren't glued to news probably aren't aware. Coverage has been extremely poor.

And something corona has shown. If there comes high mortality rate high infection rate pandemic humans are well and truly screwed. People won't obey lockdowns and countries will be reopening too soon because of economy concerns. Money is the king.

I'm not sure this is true. What is more likely, is that the global north will treat any pandemic originating in the global south as unconcerning until it already has a strong foothold amongst their own populaces. If this had started in western Europe I think it would have been treated with significantly more seriousness rather than the transparent racist assumptions about east Asian cleanliness and susceptibility to illness.

I really hope that Nivdia design gets tested and proves safe and can be medically authorised and put into production - cutting costs from $20K to $400 is a massive saving and sounds like it can be made with more base materials and components and thus suitable for rapid emergancy production at non-standard factories.

tneva82 wrote:
Money is the king.

And parties, sex, work, music, drugs and swings and slides. Lets not forget for the majority of the developed world this is the first pandemic in memory, whilst those who do remember them remember them from a distant time in the past. The whole of society isn't trained nor experienced in them. It's a blip in our lives.

It's also invisible; there's no sirens or warning lights; no big explosions we see and hear; no droning engines or whirring propellers and even then we had to employ whole armies of wardens to tell people to shut their lights off at night/cover them up. This is an invisible enemy that we can't see with the naked eye and which can hide for up to around a week within a person.

Money isn't king, its life as we've grown up during our most formative years that's king. It's hard to maintain social isolation within a species that's built around social connections. We aren't a species that only comes together to mate and otherwise would kill/fight each other. We come together to achieve pretty much everything humanity has achieved.



Also this disruption is scary to people on a level many don't realise. Staying boxed up, this change to life and this worry and fear is real and it is scary and people sometimes lash out at the scary and want it to go away. People try to convince themselves that the bad cough they head earlier in the year was corona; they try to say that its not around locally and its safe; that they can keep going back to their old life; that there's no worry or risk. People want their safety blanket of normal life back.

Pretty easy to say money isn't king or ridicule those who place a high value on economic activity if you're not the person who is furloughed and can't pay rent or mortgage and wonders how they're going to feed their family.

Those are pretty base needs. When your capability to secure them is taken away, you might have the opinion getting back to work is a damned good thing.

 CptJake wrote:
Pretty easy to say money isn't king or ridicule those who place a high value on economic activity if you're not the person who is furloughed and can't pay rent or mortgage and wonders how they're going to feed their family.

Those are pretty base needs. When your capability to secure them is taken away, you might have the opinion getting back to work is a damned good thing.

Ding ding ding.

The economic downturn which will culminate with the msismanagement since 2008 will give us our own personal little depression to deal with.

The only difference is, dead people tend to not be productive, which is why i personally belief a lessening of the measures as of yet is a tad to early for a lot of regions.
Otoh, don't doing this will damage the longterm events and might blow up the cardhouse some nations call a budget.

 CptJake wrote:
Pretty easy to say money isn't king or ridicule those who place a high value on economic activity if you're not the person who is furloughed and can't pay rent or mortgage and wonders how they're going to feed their family.

Those are pretty base needs. When your capability to secure them is taken away, you might have the opinion getting back to work is a damned good thing.

Have fun with your work when 40-50% of humanity dies.

More deadly plague than this is just matter of time. And then it will be just the same. Nobody follows guidelines and countries refusing to shut down or opening too soon.

And shows how bad companies economies are when even month income reduced/gone and companies go busto. Nobody has been preparing for this despite this being inevitable. It's not "if" but "when" something like this comes. As it is we got lucky with fairly harmless corona rather than what could have been.

So again: when(note the word. WHEN. Not if) more deadly pandemic comes humans are screwed.

tneva82 wrote:

 CptJake wrote:
Pretty easy to say money isn't king or ridicule those who place a high value on economic activity if you're not the person who is furloughed and can't pay rent or mortgage and wonders how they're going to feed their family.

Those are pretty base needs. When your capability to secure them is taken away, you might have the opinion getting back to work is a damned good thing.

Have fun with your work when 40-50% of humanity dies.

More deadly plague than this is just matter of time. And then it will be just the same. Nobody follows guidelines and countries refusing to shut down or opening too soon.

And shows how bad companies economies are when even month income reduced/gone and companies go busto. Nobody has been preparing for this despite this being inevitable. It's not "if" but "when" something like this comes. As it is we got lucky with fairly harmless corona rather than what could have been.

So again: when(note the word. WHEN. Not if) more deadly pandemic comes humans are screwed.

You lack seriously in knowledge about small scale buisness.

 CptJake wrote:
Pretty easy to say money isn't king or ridicule those who place a high value on economic activity if you're not the person who is furloughed and can't pay rent or mortgage and wonders how they're going to feed their family.

Those are pretty base needs. When your capability to secure them is taken away, you might have the opinion getting back to work is a damned good thing.

Blasphemy! Don't you know there's a pandemic on? Be off with your other concerns...

See that's why I haven't put tneva on ignore yet. Its like morbid curiosity wanting to see the posts... If its fairly harmless then why do the restrictions have to be so strict?

Also, if there is a world ending plague that kills off half of humanity, the economy and jobs will be of no concern because we will be in an apocalyptic mad max esque tribal world where every day is a fight for survival.

.

Also, I have noticed that those who are currently biting the heads off people for expressing any concern about the future of the economy also tend to be the same ones who, not too long ago, were decrying certain political decisions as being damaging to the economy. As in any damage to the economy at all as a result of these decisions was completely unacceptable.

Make of that what you will.

oddly enough, I was thinking that same thing this morning, after reading some posts on twitter. However, that route could potentially just lead to a cyclic argument of appeals to hypocrisy levelled at 'the other side' so I'm loathe to go too far down it.

It all seems a bit inevitable to me. we cant stay in this state indefinitely. things are going to have the start moving, and the later its left, the worse the consequences will be. we're starting to learn much more about the virus, and this needs to be applied in an ordered, strategic policy to allow certain establishments to get rolling again. this has already started with restaurants doing take aways and such. there's no reason this sort of thing cant be worked out and adapted.

public restrictions could definitely be looked at. its been stated that casual interactions, particularly outside are not causes of the virus spread, so as long as people use common sense and keep their distance, theres absolutely no need for people to require a reason not just to leave their homes, but also remain outside them, and the boys in black to be harassing people outdoors.

work places that have no contact with the general public could get running again. I say this having worked in a hangar full of hundreds of people for the last 2 months, as normal. social distancing has been 'in place' but its really impossible to maintain during a lot of our procedures. despite this we've had 3 confirmed cases(who came back from a ski trip in austria, before the lockdown), and a handful of suspected who have self isolated then returned, and vulnerable are working from home. This has surprised me as I'd have thought we'd have more cases with the younger single guys travelling far and wide around the country every weekend.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Lockdown restrictions and rule of law to be debated today by Parliament at 5pm. Hopefully they might iron out some of the issues.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I have noticed that over the last few pages, along with a couple of others who are now on my ignore list. Cest la vie.

Yeah exactly. This is the problem. There is no desire for a balanced debate, particularly by those who proscribed to total lockdowns and authoritarian enforcement. I can only assume that's why those types just ignore it when other people say that they are taking the pandemic seriously, but also have concerns about the economy. There's no allowance for dissention against the dogma.

that is misunderstanding the issue, breaking the "dogma" in this case leads to the further spread and exemplification of the issue at hand. Regardless if you agree or disagree with the measures taken, which without a legitimate cause would be shot down out of hand btw, the measures only work if taken seriously which is incidentally why i highly disagree with the protests against lockdowns in the US off which we atleast have one case that has lead to the creation of a new hotspot over this thread. Further basic discipline can and should be expectable regardless if you are government or governed.

I think that part of the problem is that people are used to hearing about the economy as this big political abstract made up of GDP and growth rates, whilst not realising that the lives they live are made possibe by the actual reality of it. When people talk about concerns for the economy here, this is real lives that are affected, living standards reduced, fewer opportunities, and yes, lives ended. Its not life vs money as they like to make out, its life vs life (to put it crudely) there are important discussions to be had and decisions to be made, but they are shut down and the perpetrators made out to be uncaring 'sociopaths'

i do hope you differ between why people disagree with you and don't throw them under the same proverbial bus.

Vice versa, the lack of knowledge about economy is the same as the lack of understanding of the legitimacy and fundamentals of the state they are part in and can be traced to a lack of practical education.
Also then there's the fact of certain types of government extremely distancing themselves from their basis. but that is something i allready aired....

Personal affect just kicked in. My flight to New York has been cancelled.

Ah well, I’m fully insured. Time to wait to hear from Expedia, and then look into rescheduling.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Personal affect just kicked in. My flight to New York has been cancelled.

Ah well, I’m fully insured. Time to wait to hear from Expedia, and then look into rescheduling.

Probably better to go at a different time anyway.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
.

Also, I have noticed that those who are currently biting the heads off people for expressing any concern about the future of the economy also tend to be the same ones who, not too long ago, were decrying certain political decisions as being damaging to the economy. As in any damage to the economy at all as a result of these decisions was completely unacceptable.

Make of that what you will.

I note that all the people screaming about how economic matters were irrelevant compared to the will of the people , even if it meant to economic degradation , are now the ones shouting most loudly that we should all get back to work despite the vast majority of people being in favour of the lockdown continuing and that people being kept alive is quite important with regards to their liberty.

we cant stay in this state indefinitely

I don't think anyone is seriously claiming otherwise.

Sure there's plenty of posts about what the post virus/society will be but essentially that's filler or speculation.

I think people will accept that things will be different -- at least in the short term but "thankfully" -- if you follow -- people tend to have short memories and tend to revert back to what they were doing previously quite sharpish.

At least 2 schools in my way/Kent area have told parents they're not reopening now until September.

One assumes this would have to change if the Govt. tells them otherwise,
One assumes the online teaching being provided will have to stop at some point too. I know everyone jokes about the length of teaches summer holidays but it is a fairly stressful profession and I don't think teachers can be expected to keep on providing online lessons etc throughout the summer -- even given the , presumably, lessened teaching they've been giving so far in the circumstances.

Obviously parents might/may feel differently here, understandably.





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