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Thread: Coronavirus with an R0 of 3 or beyond

  1. #436
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    damn Aragorn,

    when did you start showing symptoms, how do you think you got infected...a million questions but surely glad you're getting better...

    NAP
    To be honest, I was probably already infected a few weeks ago, when I first started having these symptoms. But I didn't have any respiratory problems, and so I didn't think that it was Covid-19. And I do have lots of other health problems. So I thought I simply had a tummy flu or something. I do have irritable bowel syndrome, and my problems were chiefly gastrointestinal at the time.

    But the symptoms were the same then as they were now, minus the pressure on my lungs. And then they went away. But that is indeed what happens with many Covid-19 infections, i.e. first they get sick, then they recover, and a few weeks later, they get sick of the same thing again. And there are people who are infected but who are experiencing no symptoms whatsoever, and who thus don't even know that they're carrying the virus around and infecting other people.

    In my case, the symptoms started coming back just before the weekend, but I was still not certain until I also started having the pressure on my lungs, and a feeling like I was drowning. And then my friend ─ she's a member here but she doesn't post a lot ─ told me she had the exact same symptoms, and it freaked her out. So I told her to get herself tested, and the test came back positive.

    Over here, there aren't enough test kits available, so they are being reserved for hospital patients and medical personnel. So I don't have any official test results, but I did speak to one of my two general physicians on the phone, and she explained the shortage of the test kits. So now I just have to maintain my quarantine. My doctor said one week will do, but I'll try waiting until after the next weekend. I'm stocked up on food, so I'm good to go. I already don't go out much anyway.

    And that brings me to the "where": it was with 99.9% certainty at the supermarket. Not everyone was maintaining their social distance, and I doubt whether everyone would be washing their hands all the time ─ most people are actually dirtbags, and the vast majority never even washes their hands after using the toilet.

    At the moment, my blood pressure is still very high, but lower than it was before. My breathing is still hampered a bit, but it's better now. My fever is gone. The gastrointestinal problems are also returning to normal. So I think I'm on the mend. I can also concentrate and think more clearly now, which was difficult earlier because of the high blood pressure ─ which felt like my skull was about to explode ─ and because this virus deprives you of oxygen. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I do feel my immune system is winning the war.





    P.S.: I'm going to move these posts to the main Covid-19 thread, so as to leave the Humour thread on course.
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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  3. #437
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    that's great news and yes, supermarkets are likely ground zero right now...Agoraphobia with good cause...
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  5. #438
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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    that's great news and yes, supermarkets are likely ground zero right now...Agoraphobia with good cause...
    I'm worried about the Supermarket too. It's pretty much the only public place I go to right now, but the chance of infection is very high. I try to minimise my visits and go at times when there are fewer people, but I might have to resort to getting my groceries delivered, which isn't so straightforward where I live. The two people from my town who I know have the virus, got it by doing multiple supermarket runs a day as a business. This thing is damn risky...

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  7. #439
    Super Moderator Wind's Avatar
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    I don't think the economy will recover, at least not fully. The way we see work might change. Part of me is thrilled about that and the other part is terrified. We could build something far better than we currently have. I think we either will learn from this or not, but if business will go "as usual" then this will lead to a collapse and wars. Hard to say which way it will go, might be a little bit of both. This is a wake up call.

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  9. #440
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    Quote Originally posted by Wind View Post
    I don't think the economy will recover, at least not fully. The way we see work might change. Part of me is thrilled about that and the other part is terrified. We could build something far better than we currently have. I think we either will learn from this or not, but if business will go "as usual" then this will lead to a collapse and wars. Hard to say which way it will go, might be a little bit of both. This is a wake up call.
    Well, no, not the economy as a whole, only some sectors. Some sectors will have to go on and even thrive, those taking care of the basic necessities, but others, that are wasteful and superfluous, will probably never recover. The Cruise ship industry is the most obvious example, but travel and tourism in general as well as the "going out" industry, whether restaurants, pubs, clubs, cafes or cinemas, will probably never return to their former glory days. Fact is people went a bit crazy in the last couple of decades and spent way too much money on things they didn't really need, which has considerable financial and environmental costs. It created a booming economy and a lot of people earning big bucks for doing work which was ultimately of little added value. I know people who were earning 3000 euro/ month only few weeks ago working as waiters in Austria and are now completely broke, can't even pay the rent. For comparison's sake, the minimum salary in Hungary is 300 euro/month and they weren't even able to save a month's salary? People like that, who are completely irresponsible and have no marketable skills are toast.

    I don't want to hurt the travel industry, because I worked in it for many years, but does it really create any added value? If you want to travel, you can pretty much organise it yourself and frankly, there are no real specialised skills needed for anyone to work in the travel industry, except perhaps some language skills. Also, most people don't need to travel at all, it should really be considered a luxury that has become far too common at great cost to both the built and natural environment.

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  11. #441
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    Hubei population ~58.5 million, area ~ 71 thousand square miles, Virus cases ~67 thousand, Virus Deaths ~3,200
    New York state population ~19.5 million, area ~ 54.5 thousand square miles, Virus cases ~105 thousand, Virus Deaths ~7,349
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  13. #442
    Super Moderator Wind's Avatar
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    I only disagree about the global warming part, but otherwise this guy has a good message.

    "When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap." ~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

    Last edited by Wind, 14th April 2020 at 06:28.

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    A worrying article from the Daily Mail about leaked figures in the UK. The real death toll is at least twice as high as being reported (currently over 11.000), because only hospital deaths from patients that tested positive for Covid-19 are counted in the official figures. At least half of total deaths come from care homes and as we saw in Spain, many carers are now refusing to work and are abandoning their charges. None of these care home deaths, now likely in the tens of thousands, are being counted in the official figures and the reason for death given in death certificates is, more often than not, given as something other than Covid-19.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...urs-alone.html

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  17. #444
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    Quote Originally posted by Chris View Post
    A worrying article from the Daily Mail about leaked figures in the UK. The real death toll is at least twice as high as being reported (currently over 11.000), because only hospital deaths from patients that tested positive for Covid-19 are counted in the official figures. At least half of total deaths come from care homes and as we saw in Spain, many carers are now refusing to work and are abandoning their charges. None of these care home deaths, now likely in the tens of thousands, are being counted in the official figures and the reason for death given in death certificates is, more often than not, given as something other than Covid-19.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...urs-alone.html
    They are being counted in the statistics here in Belgium... now. And the discrepancy with before they were counted in is shocking, to say the least. Most of the new Covid-19 deaths being reported in the news every day now are from the care homes ─ patients and staff alike. And what's even more shocking is how the hospitals are reserving the test kits and the ventilators for themselves, leaving the care homes to their own devices.
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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  19. #445
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    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...coronaviruses/

    State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

    Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

    In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

    What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

    “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

    The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

    As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

    “Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”

    The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.

    As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

    “The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.

    There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.

    Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.

    “The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

    No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China.

    Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.

    “The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

    As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.

    Shi and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3, her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus.

    The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.

    On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.

    The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao.

    We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said.

    “I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.”

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    Concerning reports have arisen from Manchuria, that a second wave of infections is hitting China, this time sparked by imported cases from Russia. Note that over one million Chinese citizens live in the Russian far east and there is considerable movement between the two countries across the Amur river as Chinese citizens go back and forth, with many owning businesses and farms in Russia.

    https://www.ccn.com/stock-futures-at...chinas-harbin/

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    Our newest hot spots are in locations where folks have not been social distancing, staying at home, self-quaranteening, etc. And our leader is fomenting violence.

    We've got Covid19 and the cray cray. (as in crazy)

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  25. #448
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    Quote Originally posted by Dreamtimer View Post
    Our newest hot spots are in locations where folks have not been social distancing, staying at home, self-quaranteening, etc. And our leader is fomenting violence.

    We've got Covid19 and the cray cray. (as in crazy)
    Outside of places like New York, California and Portland, the US is still not taking this seriously enough.

    The other issue I see, which concerns the US in particular is extreme individualism, even to Wild West levels in some areas. This hyperindividualistic attitude is likely to cost many lives in areas where it runs rampant, because people simply refuse to follow the rules or be considerate to their fellow citizens. There is some of it here in Hungary too, but to a lesser degree. I think Europe in general is more socially oriented, though of course not to the same extent as Asia, where people really do think about the good of the whole society collectively before considering their individual needs.

    I don't want to go scaremongering, but I have a bad feeling about how this will end for the US, I'm really not sure the country will come out of it intact or still resemble a country at all. To be honest, I am getting SU circa 1990 vibes, will 2021 end up being the USA's 1991? I really think that parallels with Soviet collapse are becoming ever harder to ignore. Are individual states even listening to the federal government any more? As far as I can tell they provided no help to the states whatsoever, they were just told they're on their own and individual states are competing with each other for medical supplies on the open market, trying to outbid each other and the federal government.

    A similar thing happened in Europe, with the EU proving to be utterly useless, however, the big difference is that the EU isn't and never was a country or even a federation. It is an economic and political alliance of independent countries, but as Brexit has shown, it can be disbanded at any time, without particularly severe consequences. It turns out that national governments are much better at handling their local affairs than some distant bureaucrats in Brussels, who apparently haven't even noticed yet that there is a raging pandemic out there and people need help. Well, good riddance to Brussels, but I have a feeling that Washington will become increasingly irrelevant along with it, capital of a Union in name only.

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  27. #449
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    what is that stupid philosophical meme..."It's a conundrum wrapped inside of riddle" or sumpin' like that.

    At this moment, I don't even care...I can be a herder...kill 'em all and let God sort them out! Darwinism in motion...may the best human win.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    I have long thought that the US and China will at some point will inevitably have to go to war with each other, to sort out who's top dog.

    Ever since this Coronavirus outbreak and persistent rumours about links to the Wuhan biodefence facility, I have been harbouring suspicions that this may be a part of an undeclared war between China and the US. Now Hal Turner, who used to work for US intelligence is reporting via his active contact that the US and China may indeed be already at war with each other, although open hostilities have yet to start. The below report makes for grim reading and the worst part of it is apparently behind a paywall. I think this is very credible.

    https://halturnerradioshow.com/index...ke-danger-zone

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