COVID-19 Coronavirus Thread

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Keeping a virus like this from returning to an area doesn't require total exclusion of outsiders, but it does require that you be 100% certain that anyone being admitted to the area be 100% clear of the disease, and also that we understand and treat each continent as one area with land-based borders not being considered as defensible. About the only way of achieving that is to test on someone's arrival, totally isolating then for 14 days, then retesting before releasing them. Of course that won't work with how we do things in modern times, but it wasn't uncommon for similar to happen when inter-continental travel meant sailing on a ship And speaking of ships, what happened on cruise ships was as predictable as what is happening in NYC; we need only to look at the past to know these things. The people of today will not accept such limitations willingly, and nations demanding them will find the people which they expected to visit are going to similar places with fewer restrictions, so what we're really left with is the choice between living as we need to while taking an economic hit, or taking a high risk that we won't be alive much longer.

I highly doubt that anyone is going to die from the economic impact in most places but it's possible in places where poverty is rampant, and that happens to them even before the virus arrived. Plenty of food will be produced- it's the main necessity of life which we are not going to lose just because of this disease. Hunger may become commonplace but starvation won't except in the big cities where more people will be competing for the few resources which are available. Death from exposure will also be a problem and will also be the worst in big cities. We need only to look at the Great Depression to understand what goes on in such times, as well as what we need to do to mitigate that. Where the economic pain will be the worst will be with those who have extended their credit to the max and those whose business models rely too heavily on a constant cash flow to cover today's debts. And of course the people who are employed by them. But we should keep on mind that this disease is affecting everyone everywhere fairly equally overall, which means that in comparison no nation is going to show much difference from another so in reality there will nothing lost except numbers; necessary goods and services will continue and new growth will eventually fill in the empty spots where old businesses failed.

There is a very valid need to get our economies restarted and moving again, but it's not for the reasons most people think. The economic theories and practices in worldwide use today are very much in error, and if we don't get cash moving around again ASAP they will exhibit their inherent failings which will leave all the wealthiest people in the world flat broke along with the rest of us. If cash gets flowing soon enough and big enough they can maintain their wealth, and we can continue believing we have something, for at least some time longer. But this is getting very far from the disease this thread is about so I'll say no more on that except that if the 'restart' significantly fails, then the house of cards will collapse sooner instead of later. In the meantime, many lives are going to be lost if we move too quickly which it appears that everyone is going to do, so the best we can hope for is that we aren't going to be in that statistic.

Phil
 
jokiin said:
I saw something this morning talking about a drug used for treating altitude sickness as a possible candidate which seemed an interesting possibility
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Viagra are a good drug against problems with altitude, better than chewing cocca leaves i am told.
 
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Nice but i had to morph into a American, and turn off my add blocker and just let the add blocking be taken care off by my VPN.

Always nice when someone are ahead of the curve, so St. Louis did well back then.
 
Stopping the page from loading as soon as you see the text appear will often (but not always) stop the ad blocking tech of many web sites.
I know nothing about problems with being from another country to help load web pages.
 
I am like a virus, i always find my way to where i need to go. :)
 
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I am running adblocker ultimate, i have not tried to remove it and let my VPN do the work, but they say it kill commercials too.
 
There are many lessons in the 1918 pandemic; in fact it is the most widely and deeply studied pamdemic in history because it was in relatively recent times and well documented. Most of what we know about the behavior of viral pandemics came from it. Even for a layman like myself it is a very interesting study, and I've looked into it long ago, revisiting parts of it from time to time. The two biggest lessons we need to take away from it are in how viruses are transmitted between people (which we're doing very well with) and in how timely and stringent control measures have to be for them to work at all.

Several US cities escaped that pandemic while it raged all around them by imposing absolute bans on persons entering the areas or in having those people very strictly quarantined until it was clear that they were disease-free. Some luck was involved as these few places instituted their control measures before any of the disease was in their towns, but their success is almost completely attributed to their utter rabidity in enforcing their rules- most of which were made by Doctors who were given a totally free hand to set whatever rules they thought would help. These same techniques would work today, and in fact could have been easier to do given how rapidly information gets around now. But these lessons have been lost to the idiots we have for leaders, not on account of them not knowing about them but because they ignored them. Not ignorance which is excusable, but stupidity which cannot be given any amount of tolerance in any person having any power to influence the world around them in any way.

Take for instance Gunnison Colorado- they completely escaped the first two waves of that pandemic, but had thought it was over when the third wave hit. They had zero 'herd immunity' but were only lightly affected, as the virus had weakened at that point. Nobody died there throughout the whole episode- nobody. Read about this supposedly impossible feat HERE. And there were places like Egagak Alaska where surrounding places were having as much as a 90% mortality rate while their own people were having only mild cases, and nobody yet knows why. Link to that HERE. Also in that article you'll find out about places like American Samoa and Tasmania where strict blockades of ships or the people on them held the disease at bay until it had weakened as the rest of the islands around them suffered horribly. Social distancing of some persons in this were held to 20 feet, 3 times more than we're calling for today. The depth of knowledge about viruses we have now didn't exist then. All that the Doctors had to go by back then was their observations of how previous viruses and epidemics had been shown to act. They weren't being distracted or pressured by politicians or economists who didn't want some of their recommended practices implemented; instead they were seen as being the only ones who had any chance at all of successfully fighting the disease which was killing everyone around them. That premise still holds true today. And while there was some suffering of economic loss in all these places, they did not see mass starvation or widespread deaths through environmental exposure. Truth be told they actually suffered far less overall than all the other places; again a lesson lost on our current idiot leaders.

Back then we didn't have near-instant information of events everywhere. We didn't have knowledge of genetics, DNA, RNA, and the makeup of what is now known to be a living organism which can mutate and not simply some kind of singular unchanging germ. And we had no effective treatments of anything involved save for bed rest; in fact some of the treatments which were tried proved to be detrimental. There were none of the advantages we have today, and yet the world obviously survived anyway. Which to me begs the question of why aren't we doing better today when it is so very clear that we could do so? Even if we can't yet prevent or cure Covid-19 we could have handled it much better than we have done. And this is not the end of such pandemics or their effects, so when are we going to learn how to avoid our past mistakes, for it's patently clear that we're not yet doing that very well at all. Humanity in general doesn't have to be this stupid but overall that's who we are- all of us including myself. Ending stupidity always involves some hurtiung, but that hurting ends when the stupidity is gone. Continuing the stupidity simply ensures that some form of hurting will always be present and it's usually a worse option yet it's the one we as a whole have chosen. If perchance there is intelligent and advanced life on other planets who are visiting us, they would quickly find that they want nothing to do with us at all, for our current form of humanity is very much like like a pandemic disease where only total avoidance can effect a total protection against it. As Captain Kirk might say: "Beam us up Scotty; there's no intelligent life on this planet." :eek::cry::whistle:

Phil
 
It would be ironic if we was some kind of experiment of a type 3 civilization that found some really destructive beings some place, made a few copies of those and transplanted them to a clean planet, to see how fast they would destroy it. or them self.
As Arnold say in Terminator " it is in your nature to destroy yourself"

en.wikipedia.org

Kardashev scale - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
As Denmark is starting to open up a little, testing for the virus are also going to ramp up, so temporary test facilities are popping up in major towns.

23400755-covid-19-testcenter.jpg


This is in one of the major parks in Copenhagen, where a combined drive thru / walk in test center are being put up.
I am hoping to get a invite for a test soon to figure out if i have had it or not, cuz as we know you can have it and not feel a damn thing.
Personally i don't care, but for my mothers sake i do care.

A test of hospital staff indicate +4% of those have it or have been infected.
 
kamkar1 said:
I am hoping to get a invite for a test soon to figure out if i have had it or not, cuz as we know you can have it and not feel a damn thing.
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Is that one of these antibody tests?

The UK has currently banned them all because most are no more accurate than tossing a coin, and even the best are only about 75% chance of being correct.
We have been busy testing them rather than taking the manufacturers word!
 
no just regular virus testing, i have not heard if they would run both tests on each sample, but i doubt that.
 
kamkar1 said:
no just regular virus testing, i have not heard if they would run both tests on each sample, but i doubt that.
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The antibody test requires a blood sample, the normal one is from the surface of your throat, so needs two samples to do both. The antibody test apparently doesn't show positive until 28 days after you get infected, so you really want both at the moment, although neither is really accurate enough to risk someones life on the result!
 
The Faeroes have gone a whole week without a new case, looking like they have won, with zero deaths :)

1587245621309.png
 
And here in the US, our president is now blaming the States for not doing more extensive testing when it was his own directive to severely limit testing earlier on due to their limited availability o_O Boy howdy, we sure pick some doozies over here :(

Nobody can say for certain that any tests are certain in their results. There are possible errors due to improper handling of tests, incorrect materials used in them, indication of similar but different identifiers giving false positives, and as always a question of the threshold amount of something needed to prove an identity. Even when you 'test the tests' you need to test the testing of the tests, then test that testing, and so on until you've reached as high a level of certainty in results as can be reasonably achieved. And even that will have some margin for error. All this takes time and intimate knowledge of a disease- luxuries we haven't yet had in the necessary quantities.

The RT-PCR test seems to be the most accurate at this point but same as with any sample-type testing, it's results rely heavily on the sample being taken and handled correctly. The biggest problem with is is in timing- if the sample is taken after the disease has left the throat and entered the lungs it will probably show a negative even in a heavily-infected person. For early testing it's the best we've got, and quite good when done properly. By it's nature, a minimum of 48 hours are needed to obtain the best results. The antibody tests which use blood samples vary- there are several different methods currently in use- and their accuracy is known to be lesser, yet most think that they're accurate enough to be useful. Their main advantage is speed- results can be had within minutes to hours depending on the method used, and they can be done with more portable tools than the Lab environment necessary for RT-PCR testing. They are widely accepted as being the method to use to determine antibody presence after the disease has ran it's course in a person. Accuracy is generally good enough for that purpose since at that point the person will no longer be contagious to others. At least for now it will be these kinds of tests which are used to determine an individuals ability to safely enter a normal social environment. As more of these are being done it will be easier to determine which variations are the most accurate with the others getting discarded. To ban them wholesale is an error since there's nothing any better to replace them as the RT-PCR tests do not detect accurately the antibodies but only the living disease.

For now we have to go with what we've got in these antibody tests even when it's not perfect because we haven't got anything better for the job, and by doing them multiple times you greatly reduce the chance for erroneous results in the end. In some places using them you have to test clean in two consecutive tests before being considered safe, and apparently that is enough to almost completely eliminate further disease transmissions. If you're waiting on perfect you'll die while you're waiting, and if you think that's the proper approach to take then perhaps you should as that will prevent your causing similar problems for others in the future. As a man was helping me on an adventure I was once taking, he commented that in my approach I was either being very brave or very stupid, and in time I've learned that he was absolutely right. I got lucky, but with the approach the US and the UK are taking only luck will see us through because making brave decisions can't achieve that end all by itself, and any level of stupidity is too much when the stakes are this high.

Phil
 
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SawMaster said:
And here in the US, our president is now blaming the States for not doing more extensive testing when it was his own directive to severely limit testing earlier on due to their limited availability o_O Boy howdy, we sure pick some doozies over here :(
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738,913 cases - 39,015 deaths as of today

Video as of March 18th, one month ago.

 
And there wont be a new updated video, cuz the guy making them are dead.
 
SawMaster said:
Nobody can say for certain that any tests are certain in their results.
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The tests are inaccurate for many reasons, and I wouldn't want to play russian roulette with their results, but one thing that can be said is that the country that has done the most tests is the Faeroes, with 122,403 tests per million people in their population, more than 1 in 10 people tested, and they have wiped it out. The country with the next highest testing rate is Iceland at 120,416 tests per million people and they have nearly wiped it out. Denmark is on 15,786 , USA on 11,067, and UK on 6,783.

Of course testing on its own is of no use, you have to put the data collected to work, and in the large cities that was probably never going to work. But with the assistance of some immunity and isolation to slow the spread, it is clear that testing will be able to wipe the virus out long before we get to the 60%, or whatever figure is being used at the moment, immunity level.

The reason that the Faeroes and Iceland were able to do a lot of testing is that they already had the testing facilities, normally used for their fish farming industries, plus they were very quick to act.
kvf.fo

Fish disease at root of successful corona testing

Were it not for a local scientist’s clever foresight, Faroese corona tests may have had to be sent to Denmark for analysis
kvf.fo kvf.fo
 
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There are still 3 municipalities here with no reported cases, all 3 of them inhabited larger islands. ( Samso - Læso amd fano )
So it seem like there is a bonus by living on a island,,,,,, at lest one that don't see that much traffic.
Things would not be that way if this had hit in the summer, cuz then those places are crawling with tourists and people having a summer house there.

We also have drive in concerts and drive in standup comedy now.
 
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