I wonder what everyones approach would be if we all got a second chance at dealing with this virus. I doubt there is any universal sentiment on this given the wide range of problems its produced.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Is anyone else really fecking tired of discussing this pandemic through the prism of Sweden? Every single news article that gets posted gets the “yeah, but in Sweden” treatment. It’s exhausting to siphon through these posts to get actual news and opinion. It’s such a unique country in climate and culture it has literally no bearing on every other country yet the discussion here is always dragged into comparisons with Sweden.
Anyone know what's happening in Sweden at the moment?
It’s stupid because as I posted earlier today, Sweden was “alone” with it’s methods for a matter of weeks.
The other nordics nor Germany etc never fully shut people in nor did it last long, since then they either have the same restrictions as Sweden (except for borders) or in the case of Finland for example, more relaxed restrictions now with public at footy matches etc.
Sales of spam going very well apparently, they're rolling in the stuff.
Agree. Obviously every country is unique, but also worth noting that Sweden has 0.57 death pr. thousand people, which is considerably worse than the most comparable countries Denmark (0.11) and Norway (0.05), which have similar welfare models, population density, etc.
That’s not possible as the standard used is “deaths with 28-30 days of a positive Covid19 test”. This gets run in Sweden once a week.
Norway doesn’t have a similar population density nor does it have anywhere close to the number of immigrants (same for Denmark there).
It’s as pointless to compare them, not least because as I’ve been as pains to point out, Malmö/Skåne still has less deaths than Copenhagen.
Typical of the debate here, you agree ”we can’t compare countries”, then you immediately do exactly that.
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I used ignore function long time ago. I skim through the thread daily but maybe 1% of posts are interesting.
Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University believes lockdown actually made us more vulnerable to virus' and it was the reason Spanish Flu returned with a vengeance 100 years ago.
She believes that longer-term lockdown-style social distancing makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to infectious diseases, because it keeps people unprotected from pathogens, here's the quote.
“Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”
Full article/interview here
Does tie in with the countries that had "proper" lockdowns are the ones that are seeing cases rise heavily, Italy aside.
So why was your death rate so much worse than theirs? Was Sweden just uniquely shit?
Was mostly agreeing, that constantly using Sweden is tiring, because it often gets brought up as evidence that lockdown was not necessary or helpful, which I don't believe to be true.
I don't believe you can't compare countries at all, and will maintain that the other Nordic countries are the most similar to Sweden in many ways, although the difference in number of immigrants in certainly something to take into account. I'm sure once this blows over it will be analyzed to death using all factors available and it may show that Sweden's strategy was right. I'm just saying that a death rate 5-10 times higher than Denmark, Norway and Finland warrants some skepticism of the chosen strategy.
She’s been playing this pandemic down from day one. Long before it ended up killing 800,000 people (and counting) so I would take anything she says with a massive pinch of salt. Especially an opinion that comes across like completely unsubstantiated bollox to me. How on earth does a one or two month lockdown affect the vulnerability of an entire population to new pathogens?
I was skeptical when I first watched the interview (well largely still am not even I think the virus is on its way out) which is why I never posted it here but it is quite interesting how the countries with the biggest lockdowns seem to be the ones with the biggest resurgences.
Surely the reason for the rebound is obvious, though? The countries with the strictest lockdowns had the most intense first waves. So when they open back up whatever factors caused a big surge in the first place (population density, household sizes, socialising behaviour, heavy reliance on public transport, location of international travel hubs etc) are going to amplify the next wave.
And the amount of tests are also significantly different. France for example is supposed to be between 800k and 1m tests per weeks while it was under 100k during the first wave.
UK data for today - 2 deaths, 1,406 cases
Significant case jumps coming from the North West & North East areas:
Thanks for the data.
As of Monday more than 6 million people have tested positive for Covid-19. US. MAGA!
New cases fell to under 1000 in Italy on today's report, but La Repubblica also says "Fewer tests", so I guess that explains the big fall. It's about 25% fewer tests, and the new cases are also roughly 25% down from the day before - so that adds up.
I would extend this opinion to the entire field of pop science news coverage. There is so much junk in the news like "Vitamin D sufficiency causes better outcomes in Covid patients"(this is actually one of the weaker examples but every day there must be a dozen such junk science articles). Unless you've established causality controlling for all other factors in a peer reviewed study, you shouldn't be allowed to cover it in a news article in that tone.
You can find an example just a few posts below yours where there's a poster claiming the countries with the biggest lockdowns having the worst resurgence as proof of the population being more susceptible. There is so much nuance to health outcomes and transmission rates which people ignore glibly to suit their narrative and/or to get some traffic.
Why? Can't he come to Australia (AU citizen) and then come back to the US (studying there)? If he can leave for Croatia, then he should be able to leave for Australia too, right?
Italy seems to me that it has been stable for months now. Everytime an increase/decrease in cases it is happening, it is because of the increase/decrease in tests.
I think it was hit hard (and first) at the beginning, but since then the situation there has been decent, and from what I m hearing my family/friends saying, the life is getting close to normal. Pretty much everyone I know even took beach holidays, be it within Italy or outside.
He can theoretically come back although getting one of the few daily places in quarantine isn't easy (mostly go.to 1st class passangers) and there would be no guarantee that he would be allowed out again. Not to mention the cost of the flights and quarantine.
I don't know the reporting procedures in Vic or why this group of deaths weren't reported normally.
Just more bollox from RAB, countries report differently, UK have changed their death reporting to 28 days to bring the numbers down from 50pd to 1pd
Hopefully the update on Sunday from the Victoria PM is to relax restrictions. I can't see people taking too kindly if they are to be extended.
Things seem pretty normal, just with the addition of masks and hand sanitiser. It's certainly been busy in our village during August, we've had loads of tourists as usual. The weather's been consistently hot and sunny every single day - oddly enough, the hot spell broke yesterday, just as the holidays ended.
I'm pleased for our little local businesses, at least they've managed to get a short season of trade.
Victoria down to 70 new cases today. NSW 13 all of known source
This is interesting/reassuring.
Thanks for that Pogue. That matches what I though from what I'd read but stated far more clearly. Nice find.
Just read that. Good news that there is no large pre-existing pool of virus that would evade vaccine.
Yup. I also found it interesting that a new strain can dominate without any kind of beneficial mutation, simply because it’s the first variant to get its foot in the door when the virus reaches a new population. Kind of obvious, when you think about it but still...
This is the line being peddled in Italy but I'm not sure i totally buy it. There are more tests because more people are asking to be tested i.e they think they have it. It's not random sampling.
Yeah the “founder effect”. I only learnt about that yesterday talking to a virologist about the D614G mutant. Got to say, it’s a really good paper, kind of surprised it wasn’t somewhere better than PNAS.
Cases in Bolton and Trafford have spiked ahead of restrictions being lifted from tomorrow. Both councils want measures to stay in place.
this is somewhat related to one of the most controversial debates in population genetics
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/neutral-theory-the-null-hypothesis-of-molecular-839/
Whoah. Fascinating. Never heard of that before. Quite pleased I could actually understand most of it too!
Genetics is usually complete voodoo to me. Makes my head hurt whenever I try to improve my very superficial grasp of the subject.
The spike in Bolton apparently linked to someone coming back from Spain and then going on a pub crawl. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest I wouldn't like that person if I met them.