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[feelotraveller]

Wuhan Lab or Fort Detrick - can't we have both?

[martinuzz]

ICU capacity is dropping in our country, as more and more doctors are calling in sick with burn-outs and other stress related afflictions.
Where the normal average sick leave is around 4-5%, it is now at 15%

[dragdeler]

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[Starver]

I'm assuming that'd be with a standard bubble of _four... four... ^{four... four!!!}

[Iduno]

Restaurants have also had difficulty finding staff, which is a surprise. It's not consistent work (schedules usually change weekly), the pay is bad, and it's customer-facing which can be unpleasant when they aren't giving you the plague.

[martinuzz]

My country stopped vaccinating people under the age of 60 with AstraZeneca again, now 5 cases of the rare blood platelet and trombose side effect have come up in our own country. One of them died.
Germany already stopped using AstraZeneca again last week.

The side effect seems to happen more in women of younger age. It is still deemed safe for use over age 60.
The side effect usually occurs between 7 and 10 days after vaccination.

[Starver]

Seven deaths, of 30 cases, across the 18 million UK AZ vaccinations, apparently.

For 'contrast', 2 CVSTs, not sure if either were deaths, out of 10 million Pfizers. Which puts the former firmly in 'coincidental blip' territory. Even if you imagine a convenient degree of under-reporting.

For real contrast, Coronavirus death-risk is at a magnitude of thousands (up to tens of thousands, as you get older) more likely if you catch it, un-primed.

[Ziusudra]

The WHO report on COVID origins is flawed, according to a Washington Post article.

That is not an article, it is an oped - see the "opinions" in the url?

[scriver]

I understand what your point is, but opeds are a kind of article.

[Ziusudra]

"Article" implies fact checking and that columnist has been pushing the lab angle without any facts since the beginning.

[Starver]

Spoiler: Article (click to show/hide)

[scriver]

No, every piece of writing in a paper is an article, the editorials, the news reports, even the book reviews. An article means "smaller part within the whole".

Like I said, I fully understand your point about it being an opinion piece. But you're using the language wrong.

[Starver]

Like I said, I fully understand you're point about it being an opinion piece. But your using the language wrong.

FTFY



(Because my intended "smaller part within the whole" pun, with part reference to the frilly jockstrap picture, just didn't cut the mustard. But now I've got that out of my system (*fnar fnar*), we can now return you to your regularly scheduled disagreements.)

[Bumber]

Regardless of what you want to call it, there are links in it. There's circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility. The theory is not as discredited as everyone in the news was pretending for the last year. It's more, "We didn't find any evidence after not being allowed to look." Everybody was saying it started in the wet market, until eventually even the Chinese government disowned that theory.

The Chinese scientists told officials they didn't have anything matching COVID in their labs, and everybody just took their word for it. What do you think would happen to them if they said they did, considering what happened to Li Wenliang and others who tried to sound the alarm about COVID existing in the first place?

[Duuvian]

The punishment of the whistleblower is not conducive to a functioning outbreak response and is worthy of condemnation.

It might have been an outbreak from a lab. I don't know because I'm not a virologist with the tools and experience to distinguish lab cultures from wild cultures. From what I read in the early days of the pandemic, virologists said they hadn't seen any markers of a lab strain but that it wasn't enough to conjecture with 100% reliability. That's the people with expertise saying that. My own assumption is that it came from wild animals.

One thing to remember is that there is a very vocal anti-China political push in the US and likely other Western countries. While in many ways this is warranted disagreement from a capitalistic democratic bloc, I do feel that is is being pushed by political and industry elites who would benefit financially from a new Cold War as wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East seem to have routes to winding down forming. I say this at least partially because of the way Pompeo acted.

I think this rhetoric may be a cause for the sudden change in tactics by the Chinese government and has hastened a policy change towards more pressure outwards. For example, China has moored a 200 ship "fishing fleet" within waters internationally recognized as within 200 nautical miles of the coast of the Phillipines. When you look at the map of islands being built, it reads as a line of fortification around the South China Sea that can be fortified to keep a hostile navy farther away.

I do believe the Chinese leadership is doing wrong with the Uighur camps, the civil unrest their policies are causing in Hong Kong, and now blocking the UN from doing much as a body in Myanmar. Unfortunately the US's leadership of the past 4 years particularly, though previous presidents also did, has made it very difficult to take the moral high ground on these issues without some hypocrisy involved.

I would encourage attempts to hold China's leadership accountable for such things, but I also worry that a Cold War is being pushed between the super powers when such is not necessary. The way I look at it is that barring the US economy taking off like a rocket (which may happen to some extent with the influx of money to the less wealthy, though necessary pandemic restrictions will hinder it's start imo though it's preferable to a million dead imo) or policy encouraging a baby boom/allowing more migrants to start families in the US, the Chinese government simply have the human capital to emerge the strongest economy eventually. However  should that happen,the US and Western societies will not "lose" either, as parts of it's culture and ideasare being slowly spread through internet, entertainment, and other forms of projecting culture. This is sort of the mirror of "Melting Pot America", in that culture and ideas are adapted and spread when it's sensible to those exposed to it. Ideas last far longer than weapons.