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 Overread wrote:

 Togusa wrote:
Is the disease spiking again in the UK? Everywhere in the US is just pretending like it doesn't exist.

Yes we are at 3K a day new cases. Up from when we ended lockdown which was just shy of 1K

*3k a day positive tests.


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 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Well, I think more than anything- the major factors are gonna be the deaths. And those without co-morbidity.

You'd like to think so, but the government here has transitioned seamlessly from deaths to 'cases' now the death rate is no longer scary enough. Furthermore, these PCR tests are incredibly unreliable. They only have a 60% reliability rate. They will give positives for any trace of virus, living or dead. Meaning these 'new' cases are likely not new at all, just detecting dead bits of virus in cells. It's bang out of order what the government are doing on the basis of this flawed information.
Meanwhile, cancer waiting lists are now 2-3 years long, people are being turned away from hospital despite having strokes or heart attacks, depression and suicide are up...

As someone who's returned to school recently, I think we're headed straight into a new lockdown. Even with measures in place it's impossible to maintain distance/half the people don't give a gak.
I'd really really prefer we didn't have a second lockdown, as the first was downright hellish for me. But that's the way I think it has to go.

I give it 2 weeks from now.

So? Have any of you died from it? Have any of you even got it?

The deaths aren't following the 'cases' even if they are genuine infections. We should be opening up more. Not regressing back to the previous nonsense. They punished Bolton, for having a whopping... TWO, patients in hospital with coronavirus.

But then it's coming up to autumn. My money is on them banging covid, unconfirmed and untested on all the winter deaths and say there's your second spike, here's some more authoritarian restrictions of your liberty, you're welcome.

It'll be vexing to have another lockdown soon as term is just kicking off and I've got new undergrads coming in that would doubtless like some face to face contact time. Not to mention the pain in the arse of trying to co-ordinate everything through Zoom/Skype/MS Teams/five other bloody programs. I doubt it'll last as long as the previous one did though, so if it's what's needed? Not much we can do till the vaccine appears.

The massive surge in people under 25 who appear to have terrible respiratory conditions preventing them from wearing masks is absolutely shocking though...


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 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
So? Have any of you died from it?.

Yes. But I got better.

Boris has repeatedly said that the last thing he wants is a second lockdown because of the probable damage to the economy, so most likely we'll be getting a rolling series of local restrictions rather than a full lockdown as we had earlier in the year. No idea how far they'll go with it though, could be just additional restrictions on pubs/restaurants.

 Ketara wrote:
It'll be vexing to have another lockdown soon as term is just kicking off and I've got new undergrads coming in that would doubtless like some face to face contact time.

The local college here had ~30 some cases pop up about 2 weeks after the semester started. 20 some the week after, and then they started quarantining the students. Shocking really. No one could have predicted that.
Prior to the college restarting we had about 10 cases a week in the entire county. The entire infection rate has gone up, and we're stuck with it. Meanwhile the college dithered and final decided to send everyone but the freshmen home... next month.
So two more weeks of aggressive spread into the community, and then a bunch of cases are sent back to who knows where across the country.

We almost had event here this weekend with another school, but was cancelled Monday, because the 30-person ROTC (ah, jargon there, sorry: Reserve Office Training Corps, military officer cadets in college, basically) class had five positives over the weekend. Their event has been shifted to online next month, but I'm really glad their institution caught it and bothered to tell us, because our entire household would have been exposed, we were scheduled to be feeding those kids twice, and one of the household would have been around them for 6+ hours.

There is a lot really irresponsible behavior going on, and its encroaching entirely too close to home, and even excluding concerns for me and mine, our local area does _not_ have the resources to deal with a major outbreak. Or apparently, the sense or understanding to safely isolate.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
So? Have any of you died from it? Have any of you even got it?

Personally? No. But that's because I've been bloody careful and not taken any unnecessary risks - and I *STILL* had to go get tested, because of a scare (I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say somebody was stupid and put a lot of otherwise careful people at risk through being an idiot).

I'm also friends with nurses who have seen people die directly from it, which is as close to a first-hand account as I'm going to get. These are people that were in hospital and under direct care. Oh, and then there's the spikes of cases in no less than 3 towns within 10 miles of me, one of which I actually know the backstory to how the spike happened (related to that scare).

You need to open your eyes and check your privilege. Just because you haven't experienced it, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Nope, on reflection I'm staying out of this.

I'm just here to talk about toy soldiers.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:


You'd like to think so, but the government here has transitioned seamlessly from deaths to 'cases' now the death rate is no longer scary enough. Furthermore, these PCR tests are incredibly unreliable. They only have a 60% reliability rate. They will give positives for any trace of virus, living or dead. Meaning these 'new' cases are likely not new at all, just detecting dead bits of virus in cells. It's bang out of order what the government are doing on the basis of this flawed information.
Meanwhile, cancer waiting lists are now 2-3 years long, people are being turned away from hospital despite having strokes or heart attacks, depression and suicide are up...

I can't speak for the U.K. in terms of cancer waiting lists (We are doing bone marrow aspirates for blood cancers literally day of or day after suspicion in critical cases) and people having strokes, heart attacks, etc, but that is definitely not happening here.

As far as the PCR tests having a 60% reliability rate, that is utter nonsense and you need to stop spreading false information.I run these tests on a daily basis. Yes they can potentially detect dead virus after a person is no longer infectious, but most people with out symptoms aren't going to get tested are they? The vast majority of people without symptoms that are getting tested are people that are going to be inpatients in a hospital setting, so that they can be isolated if they do have it. Most people don't meet the minimum viral load to be reliably detected by the time they are non-infectious anyway.

Here's some information if you want to be a bit more educated on the subject.
https://www.fda.gov/media/136314/download
https://jcm.asm.org/content/58/8/e00926-20

As it turns out, they tests are highly sensitive and specific, and if you have it, you are more than 95% likely to test positive. If you don't have it the rate of false positive is negligible.

I just want to remind everyone; the last thread was locked because people refused to ignore QAR despite QAR's obvious lack of good faith. Let's show the mods we've learned something and not do that again?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I just want to remind everyone; the last thread was locked because people refused to ignore QAR despite QAR's obvious lack of good faith. Let's show the mods we've learned something and not do that again?

Fair point, I really should be discussing how this affects people's hobby as the topic was intend for, and I did stray off-topic. I will reign that in. I do find it a bit hard not to get heated regarding people blowing off this topic (or worse spreading misinformation about it) as I see impact it has everyday at work. When someone says things that are clearly ignorant around me regarding covid, as a healthcare worker I feel its my responsibility to try to provide them with some fact based information to potentially help stop the spread of it. As such I should probably show myself out of this thread so people can continue discussing what the thread was intended for, and not help it devolve into an argument.

Is the UK healthcare system in danger of being overwhelmed? I thought that lock downs just attempted to defer some of the infection, the whole "flatten the curve" thing. GW better not shut down until I'm finished with their customer service, and I might want to buy something I haven't decided yet.

Various NHS people are voicing concerns that, if nothing is done to suppress the increase in cases, the current rate of admission could become unmanageable in around 3 weeks, yes. Deaths are lower than earlier in the year, in part at least because medics have a better grip on what to do and when to do it, but hospitalisation is increasing and the rate is accelerating.

The FT, amongst others, are suggesting we might have a sort of "circuit breaker" lockdown where we shut down for 2 weeks in the middle of October, which will be aligned with the usual mid term break for schools to try and minimise academic disruption.

Remains to be seen, but every day and every news report proves that access to information sadly is not accompanied with the capacity to understand it. While our current "rule of 6" has a clear objective, to minimise non-essential social contact while still trying to allow people to do stuff that pays people's wages and keeps the lights on, that message is being drowned out by memes and "witty" comments about going to work with 50 people and not being able to have your friends over for dinner.

If the case numbers are going up but death rates aren't, isn't that a good thing? People are getting the virus but it's more mild, and maybe building an immunity to it for the future?

I had read some stuff that covid death rates have followed a similar seasonality to the flu (not saying that it's no worse than the flu, but just the same seasonality where countries that normally get a high flu season early in the year tended to get covid spikes early in the year while places like Brazil and the southern parts of the US got a flatter curve later in the year but over a longer period, which is similar to their flu season). So maybe if cases are going up in the summer time, but deaths aren't, that's maybe a good thing for immunity ready for next year's bad seasons?

 Irkjoe wrote:
Is the UK healthcare system in danger of being overwhelmed? I thought that lock downs just attempted to defer some of the infection, the whole "flatten the curve" thing. GW better not shut down until I'm finished with their customer service, and I might want to buy something I haven't decided yet.

If the goal is to only stop the healthcare being overwhelmed, they can probably wait a little bit to make the decision.

In Australia our goal has been eradication... as a consequence Melbourne has now been locked down for 10 weeks and will remain so for at least a couple more. The case rate has been falling, but for a virus that is supposed to show itself within 2 weeks of infection it's been very slow.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
]If the goal is to only stop the healthcare being overwhelmed, they can probably wait a little bit to make the decision.

No, you can’t; that’s the problem with viruses, exponential growth. In a months time it will be as widespread as it was in March and there’ll be no choice but to do another national lockdown to keep hospital admissions manageable. Fortunately, as of this morning, the government advisors seem to be recognising this and talking about a “circuit break”; a less stringent lockdown affecting non-essential public interactions (e.g. pubs, non-essential retail), but leaving schools and workplaces open, enacted quickly and lasting 2-4 weeks. Figure on that coming in within a week.

Glad I finally went and got my haircut yesterday...

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I just want to remind everyone; the last thread was locked because people refused to ignore QAR despite QAR's obvious lack of good faith. Let's show the mods we've learned something and not do that again?

Yep. Set to 'Ignore'.

The issue with a rapid rise is that it will overwhelm the hospital system. It's not overwhelmed now with 3K a day, but that's 3K new people every single day. The rate of infection is faster than the rate of recovery so hospitals are only going to end up using more and more beds. Eventually they hit their limit.

And that's if it stayed at 3K, at the rate of increase it will eventually be 4K then 5K etc...


Also don't forget that whilst people might be surviving in greater numbers (though this is likely partly due to the first wave hitting a lot of care homes at the same time and also burning through a lot of very vulnerable people first); there's still the issue with major body organ damage and lung damage - many of which appear to be life changing (ergo you won't be recovering).

Whilst its a smaller portion of people, its still significant because those peopel will be long term dependants on family and thus the social system.

Why do people think Sweden is coping better with less measures - are their population more sensible or is population density / geography.

Are there lessons we should be learning?

 Overread wrote:
The issue with a rapid rise is that it will overwhelm the hospital system. It's not overwhelmed now with 3K a day, but that's 3K new people every single day. The rate of infection is faster than the rate of recovery so hospitals are only going to end up using more and more beds. Eventually they hit their limit.

And that's if it stayed at 3K, at the rate of increase it will eventually be 4K then 5K etc...

I believe they kept a number of the emergency hospitals they threw up on retainer; so paying a ground rate per diem and locking the doors until the end of the year. Just in case of necessity. So there shouldn't be any issues with beds at least, it'll be more of a problem getting the staff to man them. They'd have to do what they did earlier on in the year and start reassigning and drafting in all sorts (army medics, dental nurses, etc) again long before we hit bed capacity.

Asking if anyone here died of it, is similar to doing an election with holding hands up in a cemetary, isn't it?

Mr Morden wrote:Why do people think Sweden is coping better with less measures - are their population more sensible or is population density / geography.
Are there lessons we should be learning?

It's both actually. They're more spread out and they're more sensible. Their lockdown has been described as "optional", but it "worked" because most people did still follow it. We've already seen that'd never work in the UK or US.
That said, I say it "worked" because they still had a surprising number of cases and deaths per capita. It's not quite the success story that everyone's making it out to be.

You want real success stories? Look at South Korea and New Zealand, who locked down early, and locked down hard.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:If the case numbers are going up but death rates aren't, isn't that a good thing? People are getting the virus but it's more mild, and maybe building an immunity to it for the future?

Not really, for two reasons. One, as already pointed out, many will survive but suffer long-term effects as a result. Two, it's a virus - it mutates, that's what they do. There's a reason it's called COVID-19, not COVID-1 - the more we let it spread, the more the chances it will become a potentially worse strain.

Sabotage! wrote:As far as the PCR tests having a 60% reliability rate, that is utter nonsense and you need to stop spreading false information.

Disclaimer that I don't actually know about the accuracy rates of the tests, they might well be better (or worse!) than 60%. But two things to consider: one, we probably aren't running the same tests in the UK that you are in the US (though you seem to be in a position that you might be able to tell me if we are? If so, I'd be grateful).
The other thing is one you probably already know - the test's accuracy is up for debate if you do a throat swab that drags in your mouth on its way out. We're largely relying on self-tests here - the vast majority are drive-through ones where they give you a bag with the swab, to swab yourself and seal back up before you hand the bag back.
I trust the general UK public to read instructions and test themselves properly, about as much as I trust them to be sensible with social distance (that is to say - not much at all).

 Overread wrote:
The issue with a rapid rise is that it will overwhelm the hospital system. It's not overwhelmed now with 3K a day, but that's 3K new people every single day. The rate of infection is faster than the rate of recovery so hospitals are only going to end up using more and more beds. Eventually they hit their limit.

Sure, I agree, but what does the analysis say? I'm genuinely asking because I don't know what the case was in the UK. From the sounds of things your first wave was bad, but still didn't really overwhelm your healthcare system.

Has any analysis done on what the actual case rate (vs confirmed cases) was during the first wave and what the likely number of susceptible people is now? It may sound cruel, but if a decent portion of those who were going to die have already died then, although it sucks, there's less reason to worry about this wave.

Also don't forget that whilst people might be surviving in greater numbers (though this is likely partly due to the first wave hitting a lot of care homes at the same time and also burning through a lot of very vulnerable people first); there's still the issue with major body organ damage and lung damage - many of which appear to be life changing (ergo you won't be recovering).

It seems to have gone through care homes the world over, even with our relatively low case and death rate here it's cut through the aged care homes. I've heard theories that the contagiousness is actually way higher than is suggested by the case rate, hence why even places that haven't been hit as hard have had aged care homes decimated.

Has there been much analysis on long term affects? That's always been my concern, obviously it can happen, but what sort of rates are we talking?

I dunno how it is over there, but over here the whole thing has become political and emotional. We've had 9 months to look at what's happened through the rest of the world but people act like it's still as unknown as it ever was and it seems like analysis based upon the rest of the world doesn't factor in to local policies and the pollies acting like they are fighting it single handedly. We have the mainstream media who are clearly fear mongering, then the alternate or more right wing media that acts like it's nothing worse than the regular flu and in the end I just don't trust either of them.


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 Super Ready wrote:
You want real success stories? Look at South Korea and New Zealand, who locked down early, and locked down hard.

New Zealand has the benefit of being in the middle of no where and being easy to cut off from the rest of the world early on before things got too out of hand. By comparison, somewhere like NYC was always bound to explode because they have a huge volume of international travel.

I think once cases reach a certain level, lockdown can only mitigate rather than eliminate, and then the question is how much are people willing to sacrifice for the sake of mitigation.

In Melbourne we locked down when our daily new cases were approaching 100, with 1000 total cases, and we've now locked down for 10 weeks and our daily cases are in the 50-ish range, with lockdown ending after 12 weeks at best. You could argue our lockdown wasn't as harsh as other places, but still our retail sector is dead and a huge number of people not working across many industries (with unemployment numbers being somewhat artificially kept low through hefty government support). I think a lot of places in the western world wouldn't be able to deal with such a long lockdown without riots, I'm not sure Melbourne will be able to go through another lockdown as we're already getting protests and enough people breaking the rules to make things difficult.

But I do think there's factors other than lockdown that either aren't well understood or aren't talked about as much, as it seems some places manage it easier than others. People talk about the US as if it's doing horribly without much lockdown, but overall it's not really any worse than western europe.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Overread wrote:
The issue with a rapid rise is that it will overwhelm the hospital system. It's not overwhelmed now with 3K a day, but that's 3K new people every single day. The rate of infection is faster than the rate of recovery so hospitals are only going to end up using more and more beds. Eventually they hit their limit.

Sure, I agree, but what does the analysis say? I'm genuinely asking because I don't know what the case was in the UK. From the sounds of things your first wave was bad, but still didn't really overwhelm your healthcare system..

It depends a little by what metric you consider the healthcare system in.

In terms of cover for carehomes it broke totally. In terms of those who made it to hospitals it seems that it didn't break at the national level, but that there was a lot of regional variation. However we have to pair this against the fact that people also stopped going to the hospital for other things. Elective and non-critical operations were delayed; people chose to avoid hospitals (heart attack cases dropped by a half in hospitals) and still are; medical staff were pulling very long and back to back shifts with less time off. They also drafted in medical staff from other professions to help cover demand.

So it didn't "break" but it certainly was not smooth and the excess was most certainly felt hard. I suspect there have been many who would have died with the right treatment at the right time who have died because systems were overrun; people avoided going until the last moment; etc... Even for things that are not covid related.



The system still hasn't recovered, doctors are still by phonecall only;there's delays on major treatments still ongoing etc.. The ripple effects will be felt for years. So having a another surge and perhaps a greater surge would be hard to cope on the system; esp going into winter when the number of cases of hospital admission grows normally.



As for historical data I think that's even more of a difficult thing to pin down. They can base it on estimations of rates of infection against other countries and estimate the spread; but I think its very hard to get accurate estimations ofr the potential number of people infected who did not seek hospital support. 3K now could be greater than 3K was back then or it could be much less. What we see as 3K confirmed now might be 1K in the past. Since now we do have more testing so we are getting numbers from those who are infected, but who are not requiring hospital admittance. That said It's also now more in the north not the south so regionally its shifted its core area of infection. Furthermore even if the numbers now are less than they were back then (assuming we see more now due to wider testing) then we still have to contend with the rapid rise which is very unlikely to end on its own. So whilst we might cope ok now; without locking down regions/nation and stopping the growth, we'd just be delaying the inevitable and losing control.

 Super Ready wrote:

Mr Morden wrote:

Sabotage! wrote:As far as the PCR tests having a 60% reliability rate, that is utter nonsense and you need to stop spreading false information.

Disclaimer that I don't actually know about the accuracy rates of the tests, they might well be better (or worse!) than 60%. But two things to consider: one, we probably aren't running the same tests in the UK that you are in the US (though you seem to be in a position that you might be able to tell me if we are? If so, I'd be grateful).
The other thing is one you probably already know - the test's accuracy is up for debate if you do a throat swab that drags in your mouth on its way out. We're largely relying on self-tests here - the vast majority are drive-through ones where they give you a bag with the swab, to swab yourself and seal back up before you hand the bag back.
I trust the general UK public to read instructions and test themselves properly, about as much as I trust them to be sensible with social distance (that is to say - not much at all).

Personally I’m not sure what tests are being run by the NHS in the UK, though most PCR testing I have seen has similar specificity and sensitivity as the Genexpert testing I provided information on. Generally the nasopharyngeal collection (the test everyone complains about that goes up through the nose into “the brain (actually the sinuses)” tends to be more accurate than those collected oropharyngeal (throat). That said most of the oropharyngeal tests if properly collected are still pretty good (you can run most tests, like the Genexpert with either collection if you do proper validation for each method. I was away most collection in the UK was done at drive-ups, though not that you were collecting the specimen (in the US drive-ups are also very common but a trained medical employee does the actual collection). This can definitely reflect how effective a test is because a bad collection for pretty much anything (a wound swab, strep throat swab, venipuncture for blood testing) can often create false negatives, positives, compromised results, etc. I wouldn’t trust the general public to do collections either, as you’d be surprised how hard of a time people have following instructions to pee into a cup. A bad collection can make it so a test isn’t worth running, and in this case would lead to many more false negative tests. I do want to point out though that this doesn’t impact the accuracy of a test. They are still highly effective if performed as intended.....so stating that they are 60 percent accurate is still nonsense.

In general medical testing accuracy is much the same as anything else, it’s only true if done correctly. Stating a bad collection means this test is less effective would be like stating that condoms aren’t effective at preventing pregnancy while you are keeping one in your pocket while having sex. Proper use and all that jazz.

And I do apologize if any of this is stuff you are already aware of or sound condescending. That is not my intention at all. Having worked in my position for quite a while I find when i talk to people about various medical stuff that baseline knowledge of that kind of thing varies wildly so I try to my best to make things as simple as possible.

Thanks, Sabotage. Nothing wrong with providing a little education from a point of expertise, and while I was aware of much of your post, others won't be.
Here's food for thought... what do you make of this I wonder? The test I had (self-administered) was throat AND sinus... throat first... with the same swab. I'll admit to thinking this was very strange at the time, but considering we're looking at detecting the same thing in both areas, does using both cavities do anything to reduce the effectiveness or the test - or even, increase it?

Can't see another full-on lock down happening, that was a response to a situation they were struggling to fully understand and time was needed. But between now and Christmas I can defo see multiple local lock downs. I'm frankly amazed that greater London isn't in a worse state than the north east. The south east is one giant urban sprawl

 Irkjoe wrote:
Is the UK healthcare system in danger of being overwhelmed? I thought that lock downs just attempted to defer some of the infection, the whole "flatten the curve" thing.

Seems like there's plenty of facilities, but a real lack of staff and testing issues continue, somehow, for a first world country. I can tell you from first hand experience that if you get seriously ill with something that is not Covid, you are going to have a really hard time being seen by anyone outside of A&E

My sister in law and her children got it months ago. Her daughter had to go to the hospital, but got better. My sister in law “got better”, but has had persistent trouble with her heart and semipermanent weakness and pain in her body. She was on oxygen for a while and has been to the ER half a dozen times in the last three months. At one point she was convinced she was going to die. She’s seen cardiologists and electrophysiologists and neuro specialists and still hasn’t found any relief. She can’t work half the time, and the stress from that alone would be crushing.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I just want to remind everyone; the last thread was locked because people refused to ignore QAR despite QAR's obvious lack of good faith. Let's show the mods we've learned something and not do that again?

You mean it failed because the mods failed to enforce rule 1: bad faith posting is a violation of rule 1. There is nothing less polite than bad faith threads hitting, yet the mods won’t enforce their own rules when QAR flagrantly violates them.

 Super Ready wrote:
Thanks, Sabotage. Nothing wrong with providing a little education from a point of expertise, and while I was aware of much of your post, others won't be.
Here's food for thought... what do you make of this I wonder? The test I had (self-administered) was throat AND sinus... throat first... with the same swab. I'll admit to thinking this was very strange at the time, but considering we're looking at detecting the same thing in both areas, does using both cavities do anything to reduce the effectiveness or the test - or even, increase it?

I mean I can't say with 100% certainty how that would impact the test, but assuming the test is validated to be ran on both types of collection (which would make sense considering that's how they had you collect), I could see it increasing the likelihood that if you had covid you would test positive. As you said you are looking for the same organism and you are more likely to get enough it on the swab to be detected by swabbing multiple areas. I know at my hospital when the specimen is collected via the nasopharyngeal route our nurses swab the sinus through both nostrils with the same swab(essentially just hitting more area of the same place) and that technique has shown to increase likelihood of detection in people with the disease a significant amount (I can't recall off the top of my head the exact numbers).

More than likely if you have the disease and get a PCR test(not a point of care test or an antibody test - there are lots of varieties of those and they have wildly different efficacy) it will be detected. The general principle behind the test is that if even a small amount of the virus's DNA is on the swab collected the instrument uses a variety of enzymes to replicate the DNA's sequence and essentially creates many more copies of that DNA sequence. When you get to a certain level of viral DNA the test will detect that and declare a positive result. Because of that PCR is very effective at finding the virus. Now as mentioned, because of the small amount of viral DNA needed to detect it, and it being DNA by nature, you can test positive even if you have only a small amount of dead viral DNA and are no longer infectious. This isn't super common, but it is a possibility considering the sensitivity of PCR testing. Generally this isn't a huge issue in statistics because it doesn't happen super often and also because people will rarely go get a test performed after they have recovered fully from the virus (provided they even knew they had it in the first place considering how many people are totally asymptomatic).

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
My sister in law and her children got it months ago. Her daughter had to go to the hospital, but got better. My sister in law “got better”, but has had persistent trouble with her heart and Semite weakness and pain in her body. She was on oxygen for a while and has been to the ER half a dozen times in the last three months. At one point she was convinced she was going to die. She’s seen cardiologists and electrophysiologists and neuro specialists and still hasn’t found any relief. She can’t work half the time, and the stress from that alone would be crushing.

That is awful. I hope she is able to find some relief.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I just want to remind everyone; the last thread was locked because people refused to ignore QAR despite QAR's obvious lack of good faith. Let's show the mods we've learned something and not do that again?

You mean it failed because the mods failed to enforce rule 1: bad faith posting is a violation of rule 1. There is nothing less polite than bad faith threads hitting, yet the mods won’t enforce their own rules when QAR flagrantly violates them.

I don't disagree, but I feel like we as posters should understand that Rule #1 does not apply to bad-faith arguments or passive-aggressive posts and act accordingly.

That is one of the more worrying things - that many people who have it suffer severe consequences for a long, unknown duration.