Corona virus, Port and the AFL.

[raman]

and I've answered and answered. Feel free to read back through pages and page until you get it but you seem intent on looking for the meaning behind the meaning because it must be 'its just the flu'.

LOL no you haven't. The closest you've come to answering is to say, "I think they are still trying to find ways to match the Italy experience to validate assumptions" - a sentence providing precious little meaning as it doesn't say why they're trying to do that, or what the assumptions in fact are.

 

[JimmyBeerCans]

Watching a few news stories tonight I think the brake will be on for six-ish months people better just deal with it, I think regardless of data behind closed doors they are very concerned about the depths of winter months.

 

[Powerade 08]

Viral loads. Disgusting.

 

[sobrave]

I'm on the side of save lives now but don't want to dismiss the concerns of those who worry about the economic perils and the lives this may cost in the future. So trying to be positive, while sitting in my traditional thinking place, I've come up with something I'd like people to consider.


Now could be the time for an exciting rethink of economics. Neoliberal capitalism is inadequate for getting us through an existential crisis like this pandemic. Hence pretty much every government in the world is turning to socialist policies (many going against their fundamental instincts) to help people and businesses survive right now.


This covid crisis is showing us all that money is fairy dust. Every country in the world is affected and it is costing every country trillions. But when we get to somewhere near the end of it all the amount of real, tangible resources in the world will pretty much be the same. Food production, commodities, manufacturing, natural resources, means of production, availability of labour, whatever, will all still exist. It’s just this money bullshit that will be a problem. So…


The NoddyHolder-from-bigfooty simplistic economic solution for simple people that could save the world in the future and allow us to stay focused on saving lives now:


When the crisis is effectively over, maybe in one year’s time, we forgive all monetary debts – national, personal, business, everything - and every adult on the planet has placed into a bank account of their choosing something like 100k US dollars, tax free. Nothing gets taken from anyone, just debts forgiven. Everyone everywhere has enough to get by for a couple of years and we can all start again without the fear of crushing debt, homelessness, starvation, pestilence, erectile disfunction, whatever. Governments everywhere will have time to reset and consider things like what to do with tax systems, re-establishing some local manufacturing, providing an environment for entrepreneurs of all persuasions to thrive, ensuring a social safety net for everyone, providing the very best conditions and resources for medical research, etc. People can buy houses, start a business, go on holiday, start a band. We can even all get nice haircuts for the first time in a year.

(Sorry - I haven't prepared a table or graph to illustrate this new economic theory)


I think it can work.

This whole thing has proven that the economy isn't real and about 85% of jobs are useless and exist purely to serve this giant monolithic mythical wealth generating beast called the economy aka hypothetical numbers on a spreadsheet. We've seen what's really important are the garbage collectors, nurses, police, supermarket staff, etc etc.

Technology long ago rendered most jobs useless and these days most people get paid basically to flick pointless emails back and forth. Imagine if we didn't have this weird societal pressure to sit in an office 40 hours a week to accrue money to buy things we don't need. Imagine if instead we had time to pursue our own interests and volunteer our time to perform useful services in things we're passionate about

 

[StrappingTape]

LOL no you haven't. The closest you've come to answering is to say, "I think they are still trying to find ways to match the Italy experience to validate assumptions" - a sentence providing precious little meaning as it doesn't say why they're trying to do that, or what the assumptions in fact are.

Apologies I thought you were following along but I didn't have time to write an essay whilst doing work. Feel free to go back through the mountains of posts before that explaining it but it won't matter to you. Besides the mountain of posts explaining the reasoning from multiple people you're just intent on labelling anyone who disagrees with you or wants to know more of the actual damn data as a heartless "nothing more than a bad flu" type person. It's a classic case of "so you are saying" and just completely ignoring what the other person is saying, don't worry you are not alone there though.

 

[Steve Dore]

lol, stop arguing people, it's just the flu and the government are using this to their advantage

 

[raman]

Apologies I thought you were following along but I didn't have time to write an essay whilst doing work. Feel free to go back through the mountains of posts before that explaining it but it won't matter to you.

I can assure you I've read every one of your posts since we began this particular interlocution, which is why I know as well as you do that you've been refusing to answer a pretty simple question.

So do you think the medical profession and/or the media are exaggerating the morbidity figures of Covid-19 with a certain intent, and if you do, what do you think that intent is?

This is not a question that requires an essay.

 

[OneGreatClub]

This whole thing has proven that the economy isn't real and about 85% of jobs are useless and exist purely to serve this giant monolithic mythical wealth generating beast called the economy aka hypothetical numbers on a spreadsheet. We've seen what's really important are the garbage collectors, nurses, police, supermarket staff, etc etc.

Technology long ago rendered most jobs useless and these days most people get paid basically to flick pointless emails back and forth. Imagine if we didn't have this weird societal pressure to sit in an office 40 hours a week to accrue money to buy things we don't need. Imagine if instead we had time to pursue our own interests and volunteer our time to perform useful services in things we're passionate about

The most useless things of all are those Instagram influencers. What an absolute waste of space.

 

[OneGreatClub]

 

[OneGreatClub]

Makes me wonder if any hemophiliacs have died of Covid-19.

Now they are suggesting it is a clotting disease too.
Oh, also that statins, which many of the demographic that are most risk of serious outcomes are on, are having a detrimental effect due to lowering protective LDN too much.

The sooner they can clarify the mechanism by which this virus kills the sooner they can treat appropriately.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Couple of stories on today's PBS Newshour caught my interest. Will put them in separate posts.

Bill Gates was interviewed for 12 minutes talks about stuff he has been doing with his foundation for over 15 years in his Global Health Initiative and has warned of a pandemic coming since early last decade.

Also made a good point people need to consider. If people say you have to factor in that less cardio deaths and other deaths aren't being reported, and just counted as virus deaths, then what about deaths that have occured because resources have been transferred to fight the virus and both patient care and research for cures aren't being done and they now pass away because they aren't being attended to.

Judy Woodruff:
At a time when everyone is looking to understand the scope of the pandemic and how to minimize the threat, one of the best informed voices is that of businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates. The co-founder of Microsoft has spent the last few decades focused, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on improving global health, including reducing the spread of infectious diseases. We spoke earlier this evening.

Bill Gates, thank you very much for joining us. You were one of the prescient few years ago who said that an infectious disease outbreak was coming that could kill millions of people.
How is what is happening now different from what you expected?

Bill Gates:
Well, sadly, I would say that the economic damage is much greater.
I put $3 trillion for a respiratory virus spreading around the globe. And, you know, clearly we're going to go well beyond that. You know, the whole goal of speaking out then wasn't to be able to say, I told you so when it happened. Rather, it was to make sure we did the right thing, so that diagnostics would come out right away, the timeline for a vaccine would be very short.

And, sadly, not many of those things were done. So now we're scrambling to come up with therapeutics, scrambling to try and figure out how to get this vaccine made. But — people are rising to the occasion, but it's a very bad situation.


Talk about returning to "normalcy". Says squarely that until a vaccine is found large gatherings will be banned. So footy with no crowds will be the norm if it comes back before a vaccine.

Judy Woodruff:
But when you talk about returning to some semblance of normal, what are we saying that looks like? I mean, you mentioned keeping up social distancing. What could life look like, say, six months, a year from now?
There's still some of these — some of these steps we're taking now, they would remain in effect?

Bill Gates:
Yes. I'm working to write about that.
The closest model today is, you look at China. They are sending people back to work, but they're wearing masks. They're checking temperatures. They're not doing large sporting events. And so they have been able to avoid a large rebound.

There are countries like Sweden that aren't locking down quite as much and seeing, OK, do their numbers go up? If so, can you trace back, which are the activities that are causing that? We need to learn from all the countries. Our partner, international Health Metrics and Evaluation, is looking at forecasts, where they compatriot different countries. And then that's helping us to understand, OK, which policies in which countries seem to be working?
And so we will be far closer to normal once we get those case numbers down, but there will be some things where the benefit to the risk, like large public gatherings, may not resume until broad vaccination has taken place.

Judy Woodruff:
Meaning conventions, gathering — when you say large public gatherings, over 10 people?

Bill Gates:
Yes, well, we will have to figure out how to draw that threshold. And we may even understand age-specific risk at that point. And so having a classroom with 30 young people in it may be just fine, because their role in transmitting the disease, we will understand in the next month or so. It may be so limited that you're far more liberal with young people getting together than you would be with a general-age audience.


Allocation of resources to Covid-19 means other issues are being ignored.

Judy Woodruff:
And, finally, a personal question.
You certainly know this issue better than most anybody else, and yet it has shaken a lot of people. It has caused people who are normally, you know, together in their lives to be quite rattled. How do you think — how do you think you have been affected by this?

Bill Gates:
Well, I'm deeply shaken.
I — you know, every day, I'm like, are we really in this situation? Wow. You know, there are things like polio eradication that, you know, was — we were — we felt like we're making progress on that. This is going to be an unbelievable setback for that.

You know, people are taking the resources that are funded for that and shifting them to this priority. So, you know, who knows where we will be on those other efforts?

We have some great HIV breakthrough drugs that we want to get out into trials. Those trials aren't happening. In fact, the top people who were going to work on that are — have been reassigned to work on the coronavirus vaccine.

So, the foundation is scrambling, because it has a lot of the key understandings and relationships to accelerate some of these solutions. But our normal work is suffering. And you just look at people who are isolated at home or, you know, overcrowded in their home, or kids who are going to lose three months of learning, the amount of pain involved in this thing is gigantic. And, you know, so it's deeply troubling, but we need to still act to minimize all of that.

Yes, he said years ago that the USA was putting trillions? into defence when the real enemy was something like this.

 

[StrappingTape]

I can assure you I've read every one of your posts since we began this particular interlocution, which is why I know as well as you do that you've been refusing to answer a pretty simple question.

So do you think the medical profession and/or the media are exaggerating the morbidity figures of Covid-19 with a certain intent, and if you do, what do you think that intent is?

This is not a question that requires an essay.

OK * me here I'll add some more just for you, talking USA:

Their model is trash
the assumptions are clearly trash
they are trying to fit the data to their assumptions to validate the models
decisions are being made from the models
if they start having s**t data by introducing it, no one is helped

So I'll say it once again they need new models from accurate real world data from their own country and similar countries to be able to make better informed decisions. The same argument we made pages and pages ago that we also need that accurate data so we can compare with similar countries which means accurate data on deaths etc so moving forward so we can work out with much more accuracy how severe it really will be here, where and how to open up somehow in the future without everyone dropping dead and not having mass economic health issues anxiety/depression/suicides/family breakdowns/stress.

 

[Marat]

Okay - incoming contrarian - although I am all for flattening the curve to give us more time to plan and prepare, every day we are locked down we are borrowing against our future. That is only sustainable for a time and we need to ask what is the end game? Are we going to lock ourselves and our borders down indefinitely and slowly perish in isolation while we wait for the magic bullet of a vaccine that may well never come? If we are merely trying to slow the rate of infection then too rigid a lockdown may in fact be counter productive in that it might prevent what is a desirable and manageable rate of infection while leaving us vulnerable to future shocks.

 

[raman]

OK fu** me here I'll add some more just for you, talking USA:

Their model is trash
the assumptions are clearly trash
they are trying to fit the data to their assumptions to validate the models

OK, good. So why are they doing that? And also who specifically is "they"?

So I'll say it once again they need new models from accurate real world data from their own country and similar countries to be able to make better informed decisions. The same argument we made pages and pages ago that we also need that accurate data so we can compare with similar countries which means accurate data on deaths etc so moving forward so we can work out with much more accuracy how severe it really will be here, where and how to open up somehow in the future without everyone dropping dead and not having mass economic health issues anxiety/depression/suicides/family breakdowns/stress.

So are you happy to say this is the result of certain individual incompetence/the impossibility of complete accuracy/the system being overworked at the moment? Or do you think the data is being manipulated in a certain way for a certain reason? And if the reason is to fit the model, was the model flawed because of individual incompetence/the system being overworked, or was the model created with a certain intent?

 

[Chewy316]

Watching a few news stories tonight I think the brake will be on for six-ish months people better just deal with it, I think regardless of data behind closed doors they are very concerned about the depths of winter months.

Possible, though I would be extremely surprised if the restrictions stay in their current form for the next 6 months. No matter the period when they decide to ease the restrictions, the same questions will still apply:

Do they have a form of treatment or a vaccine? Highly doubtful on either in the next 6 months (100% no on the latter). If you lift any restriction it all comes down to ensuring that the health system does not get overloaded. This is a delicate process. Without treatment or a vaccine you have two options - either continue a lockdown which is its own kettle of fish, or you begin to lift restrictions on groups of people who as an overall demographic, appear to have the least amount of symptoms. This allows for herd immunity to be built up in a sustainable way, whilst maintaining a responsibility of not over burdening the health system.

These questions will be asked no matter when the lockdown ends. So at what point do you begin to lift the restrictions? The curve is clearly flattening, now it comes down to how flat it needs to get before the restrictions start to loosen.

 

[JimmyBeerCans]

Possible, though I would be extremely surprised if the restrictions stay in their current form for the next 6 months. No matter the period when they decide to ease the restrictions, the same questions will still apply:

Do they have a form of treatment or a vaccine? Highly doubtful on either in the next 6 months (100% no on the latter). If you lift any restriction it all comes down to ensuring that the health system does not get overloaded. This is a delicate process. Without treatment or a vaccine you have two options - either continue a lockdown which is its own kettle of fish, or you begin to lift restrictions on groups of people who as an overall demographic, appear to have the least amount of symptoms. This allows for herd immunity to be built up in a sustainable way, whilst maintaining a responsibility of not over burdening the health system.

These questions will be asked no matter when the lockdown ends. So at what point do you begin to lift the restrictions? The curve is clearly flattening, now it comes down to how flat it needs to get before the restrictions start to loosen.

This Herd immunity line gets punched out a lot but every time I read an article by an expert it seems it only really happens when effective treatments & vaccines start to roll out ie at the present stage it's a myth.

 

[sobrave]

Yes, he said years ago that the USA was putting trillions? into defence when the real enemy was something like this.

How many billions spent in the wake of 9/11 to "stamp out terrorism" (actually ended up creating more terrorists)? Covid 19 has already killed more in NYC than 9/11, excluding the rest of the country, yet American citizens violently revolt when faced with the idea of a healthcare system that already exist in every other developed nation

 

[Chewy316]

This Herd immunity line gets punched out a lot but every time I read an article by an expert it seems it only really happens when effective treatments & vaccines start to roll out ie at the present stage it's a myth.

Not necessarily. Take SARS in 2003 for instance. No vaccine there but they got on top of it.

People aren't just going to accept these restrictions for the next 6 months if the trend of decline in the rate continues. The whole purpose of these restrictions was to flatten the curve. Once it is relatively flat (rate of new infections declined to 1.77% today), you have to responsibly begin to slowly begin the assimilation of people back into the real world. Not doing so would be very much akin to having no restrictions placed on the people due the virus in the first place (ie a disaster).

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Watching a few news stories tonight I think the brake will be on for six-ish months people better just deal with it, I think regardless of data behind closed doors they are very concerned about the depths of winter months.

As soon as the government started providing funding and costings for 6 months for their different stimulus packages I knew we were in for 6 months of varying forms of lockdown. Then the NZ modelling showed peak in July in winter and I said ok another nail in the coffin. Then government started using the phrase hibernation and any doubts I had was over.

Until a vaccine is found there will be lockdowns then easing of restrictions then there will locall lockdowns of clusters.

If footy and sports comes back it won't be in front of crowds until a vaccine is found. Don't think people have grasped that yet.

It's about time management.

Wuhan has been locked down for 76 days and that was lifted at midnight earlier today. Let's see what happens once people from there start infecting others as they start moving around the city, province and country.

The Spanish flu lasted more than 1918. It's impact was supressed for awhile. 1919 the deaths was double 1918 figure and deaths continued into early 1920.

As the great Yogi Berra used to say - It ain't over, till its over.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Okay - incoming contrarian - although I am all for flattening the curve to give us more time to plan and prepare, every day we are locked down we are borrowing against our future. That is only sustainable for a time and we need to ask what is the end game? Are we going to lock ourselves and our borders down indefinitely and slowly perish in isolation while we wait for the magic bullet of a vaccine that may well never come? If we are merely trying to slow the rate of infection then too rigid a lockdown may in fact be counter productive in that it might prevent what is a desirable and manageable rate of infection while leaving us vulnerable to future shocks.

The lockdown is to get the hospitals ready.

 

[Chewy316]

The lockdown is to get the hospitals ready.

In which case, do you know when they will be ready? We've seen plenty of government ads and social media posts outlining the reopening of many hospital wards adding multiple beds, ICU beds and ventilators, but does anyone know definitively when this is all meant to have been up and running by? Because that could provide a good indicator as to when a serious consideration of lifting some of the restrictions will occur.

 

[JimmyBeerCans]

In which case, do you know when they will be ready? We've seen plenty of government ads and social media posts outlining the reopening of many hospital wards adding multiple beds, ICU beds and ventilators, but does anyone know definitively when this is all meant to have been up and running by? Because that could provide a good indicator as to when a serious consideration of lifting some of the restrictions will occur.

I think you better prepare yourself for a very marginal lifting of restrictions & probably not anytime soon.

 

[Powerage]

I can assure you I've read every one of your posts since we began this particular interlocution, which is why I know as well as you do that you've been refusing to answer a pretty simple question.

So do you think the medical profession and/or the media are exaggerating the morbidity figures of Covid-19 with a certain intent, and if you do, what do you think that intent is?

This is not a question that requires an essay.

ITS THE METICULOUSLY CRAFTED BID BY BIG PHARMA TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

God it feels so good to finally get that out. I am actually in tears.

 

[OneGreatClub]

So In a situation like the UK the reported death numbers are incorrect and under reported per date due to various factors.

Coronavirus UK death toll: why what we think we know is wrong

The figure we are all watching is likely to be an under-report, which is skewing the curve

www.theguardian.com

 

[OneGreatClub]

In which case, do you know when they will be ready? We've seen plenty of government ads and social media posts outlining the reopening of many hospital wards adding multiple beds, ICU beds and ventilators, but does anyone know definitively when this is all meant to have been up and running by? Because that could provide a good indicator as to when a serious consideration of lifting some of the restrictions will occur.

Staff need to be upskilled. That doesn’t happen overnight for such specialised areas.