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Author Topic: Untamed Virus Containment Thread:COVID-19: Lurking Omni-Flu Edition  (Read 496080 times)

misko27

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I am concerned about the trendline in the US recently.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Very concerned.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Tired of Winning Mk. CCCLXVIII
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
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Egan_BW

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did i mention that the store I work at now has self-serve food and drink again
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scriver

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Mine too Egan. Mine too.

We don't even keep a alcogel dispenser next to there any more.

...I should probably suggest we put one there.
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JoshuaFH

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Maybe I should invest in those vending machines that sell everything like in Japan. Make fully autonomous stores for the covid age.
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Reelya

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Had a slight argument with some old guy in the street, labeled me a Dan Andrews (premier of Victoria Australia) supporter for not condemning the Melbourne Covid lockdown. Firstly, he brought the guy up, I just didn't comment at all, so that makes me a staunch supporter now. I laid into the guy pointing out that I never uttered Andrew's name, it was brought up by the other dude and because I failed to either comment or agree/disagree that makes me a socialist lost cause now. I have no skin in local state politics, I'm not getting into any partisan stuff for Major Party A or Major Party B. I vote Greens/Independent but I wasn't going to tell the guy that though. I asked him if he supported the other party's dude and he said that guy was hopeless too. So I asked him why he'd be so worked up about one guy, when there wasn't anyone else to vote for and he had no response.

And the bit that ties this back to Covid more strongly is this: the criticism of Dan Andrews is that he failed to hermetically seal off hotels with interstate/foreign travelers, so the virus escaped this firewall, and then we had to go into full lockdown to stop the spread. Also, the guy said the virus was a storm in a teacup because he or I didn't know anyone with the virus.

A few things are contradictory in this analysis however. If the point is that Dan Andrews is going too far with hermetically sealing the state off, then the issue cannot logically be that his hermetic seal wasn't hardcore enough, thus the virus crept in. And of course, the reason most people don't know anyone with the virus is the exact same strict rules that were implemented.

What do they want? An alternative government who was both more diligent in hermetically isolating returning people gestapo-like yet somehow more lax with people going too and fro within the state, at the same time? That's not a coherent point of argument. It's playing a sort of hindsight game. You can't rationally lay into them by saying they should have gone full Gestapo at the hotels for returned visitors and at the same time say they should have slacked off controls on public gatherings. The virus was going to get in one way or another.

Maybe if they'd done it the way that those detractors are asking for: beef up security at interstate hotels yet allowing businesses to freely open at the same time, there would have been an outbreak from a different source, and the same detractors would be making the same complaints of not specifically predicting which things needed to be controlled to stop the virus getting in. And of course, since the next line of argument is "nobody has the virus! Fuck Dan Andrews" this proves the lie in the hotel quarantine complaint. If Andrews had actually succeeded in preventing the hotel outbreak then we'd still hate him for any restrictions at all, since there isn't any virus here.

So this is why I ignore the hate for Dan Andrews. Basically no matter what he did or what the outcome was, the same people would concoct the same criticisms. If he didn't stop the virus getting and let business' open, we'd call him a monster. If he enacted border restrictions and stopped the virus getting in, we'd call him a monster. If the border restrictions weren't 100% effective, and some virus slipped in and caused an outbreak, then we'd call him a monster whether or not he then put on restrictions on people in the state to halt further spread. It's basically the shell game of taking down a left-wing leader no matter what actually occurs.

---

The real story of why a very small number of cases escaping quarantine caused a large outbreak in the first place is that this is Melbourne, it's a fucking cold place and it was midwinter. Cold/flu virus spread a lot here. Sydney didn't have anywhere near as strict rules, yet they never had the level of virus breakout we did here. It's not because the local governments up in Sydney or Brisbane are super smart or did things any differently than we do: they have the exact same amount of bungling and bureaucracy as we do in Melbourne. Those places are just 1000 km farther north than we are, and considerably warmer. Melbourne's just a fucking cold and wet place in winter, perfect for virus spreading, so we had rules that were 10 times as strict as the more northerly parts of Australia, yet 10 times as much problem containing the virus spread at the same time. The problem is not that the government here was paradoxically both too lax and too strict at the same time, depending on which article you read.
« Last Edit: October 22, 2020, 04:54:24 pm by Reelya »
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feelotraveller

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Yeah temperature but also population density (Melbourne being the most dense area of Australia).

Politics for the vast majority of people this century (both from within politics and from the outside) is not for solving problems or discussing issues but about finding someone to blame.  And that explains the converstation entirely.  If it wasn't Andrews but, um, O'Brien (is it?) as leader then they'd be to blame - or alternatively assuming a partisan zealot then it would still be Andrews/O'Brien as the obstructionist opposition leader.  On a more personal level your old guy wanted someone to blame since then they are absolved from being part of the problem (since they are against it/you).


In other news yesterday/today (22nd October) was again a world record in newly reported cases - 423 819 according to WHO figures.  (Although the next couple of days may rewrite that yet again.)  As the general trend is still a gradual increase in the number of new cases it appears that globally we have not yet reached the peak of the pandemic.  Who knows (accidental bad pun  ;) ) how much worse it will get before it starts to taper off?
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Reelya

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A lot of the criticism is pushed most strongly by Murdoch related newspapers, so I have a feeling a Liberal Party leader would have been given a slide on that.

For example, the media could have focused on Jenny Mikakos, who is the actual health minister in the government and who resigned over the whole thing. She was actually the person with direct responsibility over the matter, not Andrews.
Yet most people have barely heard the name, while everyone has heard how Dan Andrews is to blame.

That's not an inevitable way to frame this story and not an accident: it's a deliberate framework set up by the media. They're doing "The buck stops here" but they get to decide where "here" is, and if it was a pro-business right wing leader, you'd be hearing all about the incompetent underling letting the side down and not about how Glorious Leader must take the fall for mistakes by anyone who works for him.

And the other side of that, is that their argument is that responsibility goes all the way to the top, so it had to be Dan Andrews. This isn't built into the story either, it's a deliberate framing decision. The hotel thing is about returning international visitors, why isn't that a federal government responsibility? If you know how the media works then let me tell you, if left-wing Julia Gillard was still the prime minister when this happened (instead of our current right-wing leader) and the state leader was a right-wing Liberal, then they'd frame the story as being a federal government failure and the state government as victims. That's how the shell game works at it's core.

So this is how they'd frame the same story differently depending on who's in power: Liberal State / Liberal Federal: blame the health minister or a public servant, limit the fallout. Labor State / Liberal Federal: blame leader of state labor party: "the buck stops here". Liberal State / Labor Federal: blame federal labor leader, he/she didn't provide needed leadership. Labor State / Labor Federal: they all suck, sack the lot of them.

Right now the response by the individual states is a shambles, but somehow according to the media that's not a federal government issue, it's up to the states to sort it out themselves. According to the media it isn't up to the federal government to do anything about the virus and anything that goes wrong isn't their fault. This is pure spin on party lines, and a Labor prime minister wouldn't be getting a free slide like Scott Morrison is.

So, nothing is ever a liberal party person's fault unless they can be proved to have personally done the thing themselves, and you can't reasonably blame anyone else, while everything is a labor party person's fault unless you can prove they weren't involved and they didn't take all humanly possible steps to prevent it. And even then we'll play down the Liberal wrong-doer by taking the most limited possible interpretation, demanding proof before passing judgment, while taking a "where there's smoke ..." stance for any labor party wrongdoing. For example the Liberal leader of NSW was recently revealed to have had a secret sexual relationship with a minister who was taking bribes/kickbacks related to developments, and there are police recordings of her apparently giving the nod about it. Mere weeks later, the story isn't headline news anymore. You can bet that if leftie Dan Andrews was within 1000 miles of a sex and bribery scandal we'd never hear the end of it. Even if he wasn't the one doing it: "What did you know about these other crooked people boinking, Andrews, and when did you know it?" Labor leaders are held to the standard of all-knowing commissars who clearly must have known the sex lives and corrupt dealings of literally everyone else in their party, while a Liberal leader can literally be fucking a criminal and claim they didn't know he was a crook, and the media just says "well that's fair enough, then, how could you have known?"
« Last Edit: October 22, 2020, 05:53:50 pm by Reelya »
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feelotraveller

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I hear you.  (Although I reckon it's better for a politics thread.)

Commercial media bias is a given. That's how the somewhat right of center conservative ABC ends up portrayed as a bunch of radical left-wing loonies.

Personally I blame the hairdressers for not realizing their status as essential workers and refusing to keep cutting Morrison's hair throughout the pandemic.*
[In other words be careful that the lady doth not protest too much.]

* And remember the bushfire holiday...
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misko27

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Daily reports aren't all that useful, since there's backlogs and data not reported from day of. A weeklong situation is more useful, 2 weeks even more so.

But that said there are seven countries with over 100,000 cases in the last week (US, Brazil, UK, France, India, Russia, Argentina), with some reaching several times that (I believe both the US and India are +400,000). Granted that data was from a day or two ago, but it indicates the general state of things. Hadn't heard much about Argentina.
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feelotraveller

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Here we go, pretty picture for ya.  ;)



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martinuzz

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Had a somewhat worrisome dream, where I was reading the newspaper, and it no longer reported number of corona deaths, instead it reported the number of survivors.

I should read less newspapers and game more
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http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

misko27

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Can I suggest Plague, Inc? It might jam with your current dreams.
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scriver

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Yesterday Sweden decided to renege on our crowd restrictions anyway despite choosing not to do that some weeks ago (even though things have not gotten better), if I understand things correctly. It's not good.

They also chose to remove the recommendations of isolation for elders, supposedly out of worry for their mental and physical health -- mental because of the effects of prolonged isolation and physical because they say a lot of elders have been choosing to not visit health care at all which of course means other issues accumulate under the radar. I'm split about how to act on this one.

It's still young people 20-35 or so that's doing the spreading here right now. I feel they ought to close down the universities again (ie go online) or something.
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misko27

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That reminds me of some worrying commentary from someone I know at my local hospital, but I'll wait until morning to post it because it's 2am here.

Edit: before I go to bed though, US hit 75,000 yesterday. Second time over 70000 in a week, highest numbers since July/August Peak. Up 32% from 2 weeks ago.
« Last Edit: October 23, 2020, 01:31:11 am by misko27 »
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