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[Max™]

I mean, it came from poop in the first place I thought? Someone getting crap particles on their hand with the virus but not washing their hands well enough, scratching their nose, inhaling them, they incubate for a week, then come down sick and spread it faster with coughing.

[Teneb]

I mean, it came from poop in the first place I thought? Someone getting crap particles on their hand with the virus but not washing their hands well enough, scratching their nose, inhaling them, they incubate for a week, then come down sick and spread it faster with coughing.

Wasn't it from eating bats and snakes?

[Dunamisdeos]

I mean, it came from poop in the first place I thought? Someone getting crap particles on their hand with the virus but not washing their hands well enough, scratching their nose, inhaling them, they incubate for a week, then come down sick and spread it faster with coughing.

Wasn't it from eating bats and snakes?

I heard that it came from being an immigrant, or moving into the wrong neighborhood.

[Loud Whispers]

Wasn't it from eating bats and snakes?

No one knows for sure, but I've seen people eat anything live in China for reasons indiscernible to me. Scorpions, praying mantises, turtles, fish, chicklets; ethically you ought to kill something before you start eating it, but I also don't think it's the safest idea to eat something rawer than raw. Zootic spread is inevitable under such cuisinart

[sluissa]

It's not really covered well, but the big worry isn't about how many people will get it but how fast it spreads and if too many people get it all at once.

Cutting down transmission rates by closing schools, cancelling large scale events and dispersing crowds may seem extreme, but it could also keep a bad situation from getting properly dire when hospitals fill up and then the staff are all sick at the same time.

If the worst case scenario of people all get sick at once, it's a very different story, infrastructure-wise, than if the worst case scenario of people get sick, but it's spread out over 6 months instead.

[McTraveller]

So the solution is to intentionally cripple infrastructure, etc. by quarantining 25% of a population?

[wierd]

There isn't a solution to this problem. At least not one that does not make at least one other demographic shit blood clots and half their internal organs.


Close US borders? Economic suicide.
Quarantine all infected? Economic suicide + Healthcare overload.
Ignore the problem? Economic suicide + Healthcare overload + Public Relations Nightmare.


Unless you have a way to magically cure COVID-19 infections, or are hatching a vaccine under your bum, it's too late for quarantine. I am not trying to sound like a doomsayer or anything-- but yeah.  This thing is gonna run its course, and that's that.  Our society is globally too interconnected, and relies, intrinsically, on EVERYONE continuing to go to work, being freely able to move around, etc.  The US's healthcare system is barely functional (really.), and not equipped to handle an emergency like this, because of all the money grubbers wanting pounds of flesh for inexpensively treatable illnesses, and artificially restricting the number of medical practitioners to sustain high wages.

It's harsh as fuck to say, but I say it's about fucking time something like this came to breakfast-- Maybe it will *FINALLY* get people motivated to demand actual systemic changes in how our country is run, so that we can actually deal with emergencies like these, instead of just killing assloads of people because our leaders are in bed with greedy bastards.

Oh, who am I kidding.  Wont happen even then.  We could have a literal zombie outbreak, and people would be OK with it as long as there was still superbowl and beer.

[Reelya]

Well you're going to have healthcare overload no matter what. Encouraging home quarantine would actually reduce the healthcare overload. People are going to get less flu and colds in general if you do that. It's not the reduction in Covid-19 cases that would have the most impact there, directly. That would be the ironic thing here, if the health provider's actually lose money over this because people take more care not to get infected with stuff, so there are less overall hospital admissions.

Whichever way, this is going to suck for pretty much any bricks-and-mortar business, but you'll see this accelerate the move to online deliveries.

[ChairmanPoo]

Unless you have a way to magically cure COVID-19 infections, or are hatching a vaccine under your bum, it's too late for quarantine. I am not trying to sound like a doomsayer or anything-- but yeah.  This thing is gonna run its course, and that's that.

I tend to agree

I read up a bit on the subject when border closures came up: there is scant evidence that travel bans actually prevent these epidemics from spreading. What evidence there is suggests that at most there might be a short delay before it spreads - which granted, might give you enough time to make sure your other countermeasures are in place. But overall yeah, I suspect this is what is going to happen.

One of my hopes here is that we start to mind presenteeism at work... there´s an unspoken social pressure not to call in sick with "minor" viral illnesses, which hasn´t helped this time around (one particular hospital in my home city has dozens of doctors away quarantined because one colleague kept working through the illness thinking it was just a cold).
There is not even a real reason to do it because you get paid sick leave by law. It´s just something that people do for some reason :shrug:

[Max™]

By now I'm sure some of you have seen the chart with two overlapping bell curves, one tall and skinny, the other low and wide.

Letting it run rampant like it has been for possibly weeks now (probable community infections in places without known cases showing up without links to any overseas outbreaks so it moved person to person several times before being found which it is great at due the long period before symptoms) is going to make the tall skinny curve more likely, where we frontload our infections and hit hospital/general infrastucture harder than if we were able to slow it down and flatten the curve out.

Same area under both curves, but one lets you deal with less cases at once, unfortunately the time to try for the flatter curve was back in february so buckle up now folks!


Note: the ONLY reason China capped around 100k infected was their ability to flat out say "stay at home or we throw you in jail" and people knew they weren't fucking around... not the same situation here even if we had jumped on this earlier rather than Trump LITERALLY telling his administration to ignore it and underreport/totally stop reporting testing numbers because it would look bad if the numbers went up.

[ChairmanPoo]

Note: the ONLY reason China capped around 100k infected was their ability to flat out say "stay at home or we throw you in jail" and people knew they weren't fucking around.

I suspect this too

[dragdeler]

-

[PTTG??]

It's a cool way to draw attention away from more immediate existential threats.

Well in a more general sense I would agree that there is a sore lack of actual discussion of political issues, when it comes to politics.

So much focus on the latest tweets / insults / BS. Who here can explain, without looking it up, how Biden and Bernie differ on foreign affairs, to name a random policy topic? If you don't know, it is because there is zero discussion about it. Warrens dog got more attention than her policy proposals.

This is fairly easy.

Biden is pro-war, pro-health-insurance. He also will probably continue the Trump/Obama-era human rights abuses on the border. And he has no plans to advance a meaningful effort against climate change.

Bernie, on the contrary, has a record against the wars in the middle east. He has a plan to provide the basic healthcare that citizens of every other wealth nation expect. He has a strong plan to fix the immigration system. Oh, and there's a whole green new deal situation.

This is the big picture stuff. For what it's worth, never get plan details from the news. They don't do that. Look at what the policy statements the politicians actually put out. FiveThirtyEight has shown that, generally, politicians do at least put a good faith effort into achieving their stated goals.

More generally, while Bernie seems to be doing OK in his old age, if he's still at 100% (or even above 90%), he's an outlier. Biden is clearly in worse shape, and Trump worse still. The gerontocracy is very strong in the USA, and it's not just in politics. Our business leaders are just as old. I blame nihilist capitalism.

But then, I blame that for everything.

[delphonso]

Note: the ONLY reason China capped around 100k infected was their ability to flat out say "stay at home or we throw you in jail" and people knew they weren't fucking around.

I mean, that's definitely part of it. The second part is that we all got paid (reduced, but still paid) while being inside. Also price gouging was immediately criminalized severely, so the cost of masks didn't go to 60$ each or you risked your shop being turned over by the cops and your supplies given out for free in the streets.
It couldn't happen in the US - corporations would rather have all their employees die than hurt the bottom line, and the government certainly wouldn't force it.

[Max™]

Also once they had people identified and contained they were able to track acquaintances and further infection vectors before they could spread as far.

We've been completely ignoring that shit so far.