Piers Morgan calling someone else an idiot?? ohh the irony...

Yeah he is a knob of the lowest order.

Jesus it's harrowing looking at the stats atm for Italy.. 12,428 deaths to date

Quote from: Aborted on March 31, 2020, 07:50:28 PM
Jesus it's harrowing looking at the stats atm for Italy.. 12,428 deaths to date
Mediterranean diet me hoop!

Going by the stats on Workdometer, Spain is gonna shoot past them soon enough, I reckon.

And I honestly don't believe a word coming out of China about their status.

I'm sceptical about Germany too, but then they are fucking Germans. So who knows.


Check out this guy who explains the shit out of the virus itself...


https://youtu.be/4J0d59dd-qM

Saw that earlier. Was hoping for an optimistic conclusion but no, it's just grim.

A 31 year old olympic swimmer talking about having it for the last 2 weeks..

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/olympic-gold-medalist-cameron-van-der-burgh-battling-coronavirus-n1166961

That idiotic idea some people have of it only being an issue for the elderly, sick etc  :-\


Quote from: jobrok1 on March 31, 2020, 07:58:38 PM
Going by the stats on Workdometer, Spain is gonna shoot past them soon enough, I reckon.

And I honestly don't believe a word coming out of China about their status.

I'm sceptical about Germany too, but then they are fucking Germans. So who knows.
German efficiency  ;)
Looks like their health care is coping the best out of all this.

Quote from: jobrok1 on March 31, 2020, 08:02:33 PM
Check out this guy who explains the shit out of the virus itself...


https://youtu.be/4J0d59dd-qM


I can't see the value of watching or sharing something like that at all (I didn't watch it) because unless that video gives some description of how this information can be used to help oneself stem the infection and get over the thing, it does nothing beyond spreading the fear which is virulent in itself. Knowledge is not always power.

I'm not saying nobody at all should watch it, as a lot of people can view these things in a very detached way, or need to watch them because it is beneficial to some research they are involved in but if your regular person on the street is watching the likes of this and sharing it with their pals/acquaintances over social media, then it is hard to blame them for panic buying massive amounts of things and leaving nothing for everybody else because this stuff makes them afraid. I'm meeting people every day who have themselves entirely tortured with this shit and love to regale me with the horrors of it all even though I ask them not to. I was torturing myself with it a bit, too but I had to stop for my sanity.

I doubt watching a detailed video of the mechanics of exactly how influenza or septicaemia or ebola or getting rolled over by a steamroller or getting the electric chair or even starvation or fucking old age kills somebody would be any less grim if you were someone in the high risk group for getting done in by that. I think this shit is counterproductive to a measured and reasoned response to the situation we find ourselves in, no matter how learned or well meaning the person telling you all of the details in the video seems to be.

Actually fuck it let's pepper the place with detailed videos of how malnutrition and cholera and bullets kills children and their parents and their grandparents in third world African countries, and we can sit back and watch everybody panic buying everything in their desperation to share food and medicine and money for shelter from the horrors they face on a daily basis with them. At least that would be actually helpful and could possibly achieve some good. Oh wait, none of those people matter because they are in third world countries and it is their own fault and besides, their instagram accounts are so like famine and genocide ridden and shit they are just so like old news, so last years' trocaire box...

Bit of a rant, but I was making a point in there somewhere. Also nothing personal to OP, it's just a generalised point or 2

Quote from: jobrok1 on March 31, 2020, 07:58:38 PMI honestly don't believe a word coming out of China about their status.

I've a mate over there who reckons that life is getting back to normal. Still plenty of masks and precautions being taken, but he's back to work, restaurants/bars/shops etc. are all open again and people are tentatively living a more-or-less normal life again. Saying that, he's in Wuxi which is a few hundred miles away from Wuhan.



Might be an unfair to put COVID19 on this graph with it being so new. It's not a comparison per say but more of an insight into variation/mutation over time. So if a virus stays closely to the straight line it'd be less variant, less mutations.

Mutations can be good or bad (SARS was contained and died off). New viruses when they emerge will change until it becomes more stable (or die off). If a virus is deadly it might kill so many hosts that it just can't persist as much as a less dangerous version of itself. Less deadly, more likely the event of staying in the host long enough to spread to more people. COVID19 is that type of virus, spreads easily and takes a good while to kill a small % of people. It's also shitty that it can spread with little or no symptoms.

Anyway, COVID19 is spread on the graph where the other viruses are more mature and are more tightly bound to the central line so less mutations going on over time and as expected some of the mutations in the new virus go nowhere and the lineage dies off.

I think what we will be looking for in the coming months is - what persists (will there be multiple strains at once / one strain then another later on = waves). From my reading there is 2 persistent strains so far, one less deadly. The worst case scenario is a seasonal SARS-CoV-2 that mutates along that straight line so regularly that vaccines are of limited use and life expectancy takes a massive thump, making it very unlikely to see past our 80s, even 70s with a % chance each year of getting hit with this in your 30s/40s/50s. That first hit or second dose might hit you with lung damage, with a chance of getting hit again few years later, killing you off. This is the worst case now but I can see why this is taken so so seriously and measures to some might seem so drastic and "over the top".

As small of a probability of this scenario playing out over the next year is - I think people need to wake up to the possibility. I personally like to know what is at stake but at the same time, I wouldn't mull over this for too long, there is little we can do in the grand scale of things but on day to day - try not to be an idiot during the lockdown.


What of immunity then? Is your thinking that, because of so much mutation, there'll be effectively no chance of building up immunity to it, as with flu? (Although, some people do have stronger immune resistance to flu).

I see Eddie Large from 80s double act Little and Large has died of it.

Quote from: Black Shepherd Carnage on April 02, 2020, 11:02:50 AM
What of immunity then? Is your thinking that, because of so much mutation, there'll be effectively no chance of building up immunity to it, as with flu? (Although, some people do have stronger immune resistance to flu).

"When about 70 percent of the population have been infected and recovered, the chances of outbreaks of the disease become much less because most people are resistant to infection," said Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

This was originally the position of the UK (and I think the Swedes/Dutch approach now) but then they realised a big surge over 4-6 weeks would cripple their health system and cause a huge increase in deaths. So hence social distancing/lockdown measures now in place around the world. Each country is now in different stages of it spreading so would be hard to co-ordinate a worldwide response to eradicate it fully. From other experts in the UK the main idea was 60-70% of total population to get infected & to recover in other to stop it.

This is a good site to check out->
https://nextstrain.org/ncov

That might look scary but not every mutation is a distinct strain.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1242628551557316608

One of his last tweets ->

So, my prediction is that we should see occasional mutations to the spike protein of #SARSCoV2 that allow the virus to partially escape from vaccines or existing "herd" immunity, but that this process will most likely take years rather than months.