SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Pogue Mahone said:
I’m only half joking. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We could be out of this shit by now if we’d been able to copy their approach.
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It’s impressive testing millions in such a short space of time. Puts the west to shame
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It really is incredible how they’ve completely crushed this thing. Shows what can be achieved when you’re not hindered by pesky rules around data protection and human rights.
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Still a bit fishy they have almost no new cases if you ask me.
 
Godfather said:
Still a bit fishy they have almost no new cases if you ask me.
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It’s not really. They took extreme measures to get an extreme outcome. Completely closed their borders and did a longer, more extreme and rigorously enforced lockdown than any European country. Testing on a monstrous scale, with citizens forced to give up their data for tracking/tracing. They even separated anyone who tested positive from their families the instant results came back positive (which they had to wait for at the centre they were tested in). Put them in massive temporary field hospitals until they recovered. Just a bunch of really radical measures that would be political suicide (and mass infringement of human rights) anywhere else but they got the job done. You kind of have to admire them.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s not really. They took extreme measures to get an extreme outcome. Completely closed their borders and did a longer, more extreme and rigorously enforced lockdown than any European country. Testing on a monstrous scale, with citizens forced to give up their data for tracking/tracing. They even separated anyone who tested positive from their families the instant results came back positive (which they had to wait for at the centre they were tested in). Put them in massive temporary field hospitals until they recovered. Just a bunch of really radical measures that would be political suicide (and mass infringement of human rights) anywhere else but they got the job done. You kind of have to admire them.
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It sure paid off. All getting very very messy in Europe again. Another shutdown won't come though (at least here in Austria). Would be economical suicide.
 
redshaw said:
China recently mass tested a whole area becasue of two cases. They don't mess around hoping cases will drop or level out.
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Victoria traced one Melbourne case (a truck driver) and found he had driven to a town outside Melbourne. They identified 400 contacts who had to isolate, tested 6000+ people in the one town and kept the outbreak to 3 cases.

Almost impossible to do unless you have very few cases.

Short of a national stage 5 lockdown including closing national borders with police guarded hotel quarantine for returning residents (which obviously isn't on the table) it is hard to see how the UK can get their cases low enough to do full scale track and trace. Which of course doesn't mean it still isn't important to do what you can.
 
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Agree with godfather and wibble.

You have to be very naive to think China has zero cases. ZERO.

Even Australia/NZ being islands and Korea with extensive testing do not see zero.

China's numbers are what the CCP wants them to be. As with everything else.

At the same time, for China's population, 100 cases or even a thousand cases a day which are quickly identified are essentially zero. Even 1000 cases is less than 50 cases/day normalized to the UK's population.

And talking to people on the ground in China, I do not think the number of cases is more than a thousand per day (and probably closer to 100).

gormless said:
My best friend lives in China. I asked him how the Covid situation was yesterday. His reply was “What Covid situation? It lasted one month.”
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Where does he live?

Talking to people in Shanghai, there were extremely strict Covid requirements for at least 3 months.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Ah. Ok. Makes sense. So red states on the increase might be driven more by geography than politics?
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I think it is certainly a large part of it.

Liberals shouldn't need to resort to dodgy stats to prove a completely valid point.

Rolling average of new cases per million would have been more accurate. This infographic deliberately chooses a date when NY, NJ, CT, IL start to tail off and the South and CA start rising.
 
SinNombre said:
Even Australia/NZ being islands and Korea with extensive testing do not see zero.
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NZ has eradicated again and Australia only had 3 new cases yesterday (barring overseas arrivals in quarantine). Very hard to eradicate in a country the size of Australia and I'd be surprised if we managed it through to a vaccine. It would be great of course.

We also had our first quarantine free flight arrivals from NZ which was a moral boost.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It really is incredible how they’ve completely crushed this thing. Shows what can be achieved when you’re not hindered by pesky rules around data protection and human rights.
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and a state with capability. even in a capitalist economy, they have not hollowed out the state like almost all countries have done since the 80s. millions of state employees and large companies. the rapid setting-up of hospitals, the rapid increase in mask production (even now the vast majority of masks sold worldwide are made there, 9 months after they couldn't supply a single city), the mobilisation of doctors and nurses into Wuhan, and the way they have implemented quarantine after the initial chaos (food delivery+monitoring).
you were happy with the UK's billions spent on faulty contact tracing. imagine if china had to pay consulting companies to come up with ways to do each of those things, and then pay agencies for outsourcing. the funny thing is, unlike the US, the british state does have a large permanent bureacracy supposedly with institutional memory which one ran half the world, this is the kind of place where they could have proven useful.

in india we have in reality zero data or human rights protection but no comparable success. we even have a massive bureacracy and large PSUs (railways) but their response has been awful beyond belief. corrupt and confused leadership, an informal economy, and the state has never attempted something at this scale.
the trump govt can do many things in red states (with friendly state govts and a partisan judiciary) and there hasn't even been a semblance of an attempt, quite the opposite. same applies to russia, and probably many other places.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I’m only half joking. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We could be out of this shit by now if we’d been able to copy their approach.
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Have to agree with you: although there are obvious reasons to why we have those ...”obstacles” in place that we do, not having them has shown to have its advantages in addressing an issue like this.
 
berbatrick said:
in india we have in reality zero data or human rights protection but no comparable success.
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I find this really interesting, not least because my best friend now lives in India and I find myself far more drawn to domestic stories from there than ever before. Interesting to consider different “capabilities” even in different countries with a relatively similar lack of certain rights (according to you!)
 
Charlie Foley said:
I find this really interesting, not least because my best friend now lives in India and I find myself far more drawn to domestic stories from there than ever before. Interesting to consider different “capabilities” even in different countries with a relatively similar lack of certain rights (according to you!)
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berba doesn't like the current ruling party in India.

It is silly to compare India and China on civil rights. The fact that he and millions of others can constantly criticize the ruling party and democratically get them changed is already evidence of it.

From the last human rights report, comparing the 3 biggest countries in the 3 categories of "personal freedom" that most need to be curtailed to authoritatively kill a pandemic
CategoryChinaIndiaUS
Assoc., Assembly and Civil Society1.5710
Movement3.36.710
Expression and Information5.27.99.2

The first 2 means you can effectively kill all assembly and movement in China.


Honestly, if you want to look at a good developing world examples, Sri Lanka or Malaysia are much better. Vietnam as well but at the cost of more civil rights.
 
Charlie Foley said:
I find this really interesting, not least because my best friend now lives in India and I find myself far more drawn to domestic stories from there than ever before. Interesting to consider different “capabilities” even in different countries with a relatively similar lack of certain rights (according to you!)
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i should clarify that on paper we have all the human rights you'd expect from a liberal democracy and a few years ago the supreme court affirmed the right to privacy 9-0.

but the same court has bent over backwards to deny very basic petitions (like habeus corpus, without that there is no effective right against indefinite detention), and have sided with the government and ruling party in practically every major case for 6 years. the criminal provision for sedition, anti-terrorist laws, and preventive detention have meant that dozens of barely-known govt opponents are in jail for months without trial and sometimes without being charged. govt-friendly news channels have obtained private text messages, the police routinely leak them too, and again neither the govt nor the courts have said a word about our fundamental right to privacy.

the vast majority of people aren't just supportive of the newly re-elected central govt, they trust the PM deeply. if he said clearly that something was necessary, nothing could stop it from happening (and being popular among the population).

so i feel that in reality (as opposed to on paper) there was nothing stopping the govt from responding in whatever way they wanted to.
 
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Pogue Mahone said:
I’m only half joking. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We could be out of this shit by now if we’d been able to copy their approach.
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The idiots who dismiss the virus often focus on the low numbers of deaths. It’s not the deaths that’s the issue, it’s the negative knock-on effects of paralyzing the health care systems with the sick. Why wouldn’t someone willingly give up some of their freedoms for a period of time to potentially ensure the slowdown of the spread of the virus until a true vaccine is created? How can idiots not see that as anything but good?
 
calodo2003 said:
The idiots who dismiss the virus often focus on the low numbers of deaths. It’s not the deaths that’s the issue, it’s the negative knock-on effects of paralyzing the health care systems with the sick. Why wouldn’t someone willingly give up some of their freedoms for a period of time to potentially ensure the slowdown of the spread of the virus until a true vaccine is created? How can idiots not see that as anything but good?
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Because they want to feel special and enlightened. They don’t care about other people because they consider them dumb and stupid, they know the ‘truth’ about the virus and feel they are so much above everybody else.
 
Sarni said:
Because they want to feel special and enlightened. They don’t care about other people because they consider them dumb and stupid, they know the ‘truth’ about the virus and feel they are so much above everybody else.
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That’s very Q of them.
 
Sarni said:
Because they want to feel special and enlightened. They don’t care about other people because they consider them dumb and stupid, they know the ‘truth’ about the virus and feel they are so much above everybody else.
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Did we shut down the country for Flu last year? No, we just go on with < - Keep seeing that amongst a few people I know
 
Tibs said:
Did we shut down the country for Flu last year? No, we just go on with < - Keep seeing that amongst a few people I know
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Yeah it’s all over the place here too. Fortunately they seem to be prevalent on the internet mostly, where comments on FB and such are full of idiots. On the streets nowadays it appears that basically everyone is wearing a mask and obeying the rules. Not many really believe 100 people are dying daily of covid but as long as they wear masks and keep distance their beliefs are irrelevant.
 
Tibs said:
Did we shut down the country for Flu last year? No, we just go on with < - Keep seeing that amongst a few people I know
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The traction this snippet of lunacy has is something else. When people can’t get adequate emergent medical care for things like the flu, I wonder to what those that use this will pivot.
 
acnumber9 said:
I know there’s bigger issues at hand but mayors of cities shouldn’t be saying things like “more safer.”
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Glad I'm not the only one this irritated.
Rolandofgilead said:
My sister has covid. Just got her results back. She's proper rough. My best mate and his wife also both positive but not quite as rough.
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Shit, sorry to hear that mate. Fingers crossed for them all
KirkDuyt said:
Got my test results. No covid for me.
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Top news!
 
711 said:
Good news. Two strong possibles by late November now. You convinced me of your 'almost certain' a while ago though Wibs.
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We so need this sort of good news. Fingers crossed we get one or more vaccines through phase 3 trials soon. The world needs this to boost moral as much as anything.

I'm stressed enough in Australia so I can't imagine what you are all going through in the UK.
 
calodo2003 said:
The traction this snippet of lunacy has is something else. When people can’t get adequate emergent medical care for things like the flu, I wonder to what those that use this will pivot.
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Unfortunately, I think some people actually need to experience it to understand it. Problem is, they'll probably blame the government even then. And I'm not talking UK specific here, it's the same all over Europe.

Most people only think about the direct consequence a virus contraction will have on their health, not what hospitals filled to the brim with people on ICU will mean if they have a heart attack, get injured in a car accident or needs a back operation.
 
I cant understand the UK's approach to these new tiers. The Mayor of Manchester is negotiating with the government over new restrictions. Why? You're the central government ffs. Just set the rules and tell them to follow. It's not a time for negotiations and party politics. The tier system is the right idea but the implementation is creating so much confusion.
 
11101 said:
I cant understand the UK's approach to these new tiers. The Mayor of Manchester is negotiating with the government over new restrictions. Why? You're the central government ffs. Just set the rules and tell them to follow. It's not a time for negotiations and party politics. The tier system is the right idea but the implementation is creating so much confusion.
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At least your central government has the semblance of a policy...
 
11101 said:
I cant understand the UK's approach to these new tiers. The Mayor of Manchester is negotiating with the government over new restrictions. Why? You're the central government ffs. Just set the rules and tell them to follow. It's not a time for negotiations and party politics. The tier system is the right idea but the implementation is creating so much confusion.
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One factor is that the public health experts have stated that additional local rules will be needed in the worst hit cities, towns and villages to be really effective, and also that local public health officials are the best placed to design them and respond to new needs. So they need local governments on board, in some way.

And it's been clear for a while now that resentment was building rapidly in the north so a dictatorial approach would lead to a political disaster and very possibly some civilian revolt. At this point it seems like a lot of local communities are on board with local governments fighting back, so if that option is taken off the table, I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks decide to just feck the rules altogether, while others would take to more formal protests. Which brings a few different risks with it.

They might do that in the end anyway but it's hardly a no brainer. You need citizens to be on board for public health policy to be effective. The stick can only do so much, especially when the prospect of police fines is being weighed up against their loss of income anyway.

And that old thing about basic democratic principles being upheld. The federal approach worked very well e.g. Germany but they did have a lot more protests too, in part because they didn't like being treated unfairly vs. their neighbours.
 
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