Coronavirus General Discussion

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dualstow
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Tue Sep 21, 2021 2:29 pm

That’s a great follow-up, WiseOne. Thank you! Just goes to show how complex this stuff is. Not that it can’t eventually be understood, but there are so many variables and details.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Cortopassi » Tue Sep 21, 2021 3:09 pm

WiseOne wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:58 am
I've done quite an about face on the COVID vaccine, on the face of it.
Great that you acknowledge that.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people could go back and sift through their posts (FB, here, wherever) and see it was a somewhat kinder, gentler posting world the further back you go, with less hard and fast positions.

Now it's no holds barred, "I'd rather die than change my mind" a lot of times.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Hal » Tue Sep 21, 2021 10:13 pm

Melbourne, Australia is going to be No. 1 O0

Tomorrow, Melbourne takes the world record as the most lockdown city at 235 days. We will beat that by a long margin.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/0 ... control-2/

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/0 ... arthquake/

It gets better! KFC smuggling :o
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/poli ... d-auckland
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by whatchamacallit » Tue Sep 21, 2021 10:30 pm

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/new- ... index.html

Two alleged gang associates found with a car trunk "full of KFC" takeout were arrested as they tried to enter New Zealand's largest city on Sunday in breach of strict coronavirus lockdown rules, according to police.





With this kind of tyranny I would feel like it was my constitutional duty to be arrested. Sheesh.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by boglerdude » Wed Sep 22, 2021 1:35 am

Hundreds of posts about the damage done by covid-burqas and house arrest, and they still cant question if it was necessary: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comm ... vid19_has/

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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by sweetbthescrivener » Thu Sep 23, 2021 12:25 pm

@boglerdude

All of this gets dismissed so easily by most everyone.

None of it will be vindicated until vaccine status gets tied into bio-metrics which becomes a de facto ID system. If this is then connected to payment systems then the conspiracy theorists are right, only it is too late.

Until that happens, in real life anyway, I am keeping my opinion to myself.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Thu Sep 23, 2021 1:38 pm

30 facts you need to know about COVID....

https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/22/30- ... cribsheet/

I'm not qualified to judge anything in this article so all I can say is that all of the assertions ring true to me.

I think WiseOne probably agrees with this one...
PART III: PCR TESTS
11. PCR tests were not designed to diagnose illness. The Reverse-Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is described in the media as the “gold standard” for Covid diagnosis. But the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the process never intended it to be used as a diagnostic tool, and said so publicly:

PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.”
And another one about the vaccines. Can anyone deny that this is true, regardless of what you think about the vaccines?
25. The vaccines were rushed and have unknown longterm effects.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:21 pm

Hal wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 10:13 pm

It gets better! KFC smuggling :o
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/poli ... d-auckland
At once funny and sad
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:00 pm

Taylor Lee, FDA Economist: “Go to the unvaccinated and blow it [COVID vaccine] into them. Blow dart it into them.”
Lee: “Census goes door-to-door if you don’t respond. So, we have the infrastructure to do it [forced COVID vaccinations]. I mean, it’ll cost a ton of money. But I think, at that point, I think there needs to be a registry of people who aren’t vaccinated. Although that’s sounding very [much like Nazi] Germany.”
Lee: “Nazi Germany…I mean, think about it like the Jewish Star [for unvaccinated Americans].”
Lee: “So, if you put every anti-vaxxer, like sheep, into like Texas and you closed off Texas from the rest of the world, and you go, ‘Okay, you be you in Texas until we deal with this [pandemic].’”
Taylor Lee, FDA Economist: “I think that a lot of the time -- so there's also this issue of -- I remember reading about how with COVID [vaccine] trials, they were having an issue recruiting African American people. It was because of a different medication the government tried to do that was specifically designed to kill African Americans.”

Veritas Journalist: “Oh, so like a mistrust thing.”

Lee: “Yeah.”

Veritas Journalist: “But this thing [COVID vaccine] is safe, though.”

Lee: “We know that now, but like again, I think there is still this big mistrust and like it's deep-rooted.”

Veritas Journalist: “Yeah. Can’t blame them [African Americans].”

Lee: “I can’t. But at the same time, like, blow dart. That’s where we’re going.”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/fda ... here-were/

Hmm. It seems like some evil people work at the FDA. It's good to know one of them by name.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:23 pm

Holy shite.
What # drink was he on?
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Hal » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:42 pm

dualstow wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:21 pm
Hal wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 10:13 pm

It gets better! KFC smuggling :o
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/poli ... d-auckland
At once funny and sad
You want sad..
https://www.rebelnews.com/police_deploy ... _melbourne

The Gov't hypocrisy is amazing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DiF7khB0lI

PS: Out of curiosity, what would happen in the USA if a state went full Nazi, declared a state of emergency and closed the borders? Does the constitution/bill of rights provide any real protection?
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:26 pm

Hal wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:42 pm
PS: Out of curiosity, what would happen in the USA if a state went full Nazi, declared a state of emergency and closed the borders? Does the constitution/bill of rights provide any real protection?
I think only Hawaii and Alaska could get away with that, logistically speaking. In fact, I think both states did try to close their borders to a large extent during the height of the pandemic.

But why do you call it full Nazi? The Iron curtain and Berlin wall were communist things.

As for the Bill of RIghts it's just words on paper and offers no protection at all if there isn't a government in place and willing to enforce it.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:43 pm

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... oft-drinks

I saw a link to a similar article this morning on the MSN feed which you get if Bing is your default search engine. I was going to share it but it disappeared quickly and I had to find another one.

Kids who want to stay home from school have apparently discovered that drinking soda or an acidic juice can give you a positive PCR test.

And I guess that's considered a COVID "case" in the statistics?
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Hal » Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:44 pm

pp4me wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:26 pm
As for the Bill of RIghts it's just words on paper and offers no protection at all if there isn't a government in place and willing to enforce it.
So the Federal Gov't in the USA, in practice, wouldn't do anything if a state didn't obey the bill of rights? Don't want to get too off topic, but this has really piqued my interest.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Xan » Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:55 pm

Hal wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:44 pm
pp4me wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:26 pm
As for the Bill of RIghts it's just words on paper and offers no protection at all if there isn't a government in place and willing to enforce it.
So the Federal Gov't in the USA, in practice, wouldn't do anything if a state didn't obey the bill of rights? Don't want to get too off topic, but this has really piqued my interest.
I believe pp4me's point is that if enough of the people in power actually don't care to protect some right, then it won't be protected, regardless of what the Bill of Rights says.

Actually your question brings up a whole host of interesting issues. The Bill of Rights was a constraint on the federal government against the states. The states were not bound by the Bill of Rights at all. For example, at the time the Bill of Rights was drafted, at least one state had an established church.

Only after the revolution of 1865 established a different form of government through the 14th Amendment did the Bill of Rights start applying to states, in a kind of undefined, piecemeal way, court decision by court decision.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 am

Xan wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:55 pm
I believe pp4me's point is that if enough of the people in power actually don't care to protect some right, then it won't be protected, regardless of what the Bill of Rights says.
Yeah, that's what I meant.

Also, it's up to the Supreme Court to interpret the text and determine whether or not the Bill of Rights applies in specific situations. So all you need are enough activist judges on the court and they can say it means whatever they want. They find new rights like abortion and gay marriage in penumbras and emanations and they can do the same thing to limit rights. A famous example of that was the "can't yell fire in a crowded theater" decision to limit free speech. That decision was actually used against WW1 anti-war protestors. A more recent example was the decision that went against the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even with what is supposed to be a conservative court, they apparently decided that the gay marriage right which was nowhere to be found in the text trumped the baker's explicit right to freedom of religion.

In other words, I guess I'm saying that the idea that the idea of the Bill of Rights guarantees us anything is a complete fiction. It was a noble attempt to limit the power of the government, maybe the best that could be done, but when all is said and done, the government (and that includes the Supreme Court), still has us by the balls and always will as long as there is a government. They make the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws (or choose not to in some cases like the border).

Veering back on topic however, I'm not aware that any of the COVID stuff, lockdowns, mandates, etc, has made it all the way to the Supreme Court yet but my guess is that even this conservative Supreme Court will pretty much let the governments get away with whatever they want to do because of the pandemic.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by I Shrugged » Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:22 pm

pp4me wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 am
Xan wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:55 pm
I believe pp4me's point is that if enough of the people in power actually don't care to protect some right, then it won't be protected, regardless of what the Bill of Rights says.
Yeah, that's what I meant.

Also, it's up to the Supreme Court to interpret the text and determine whether or not the Bill of Rights applies in specific situations. So all you need are enough activist judges on the court and they can say it means whatever they want. They find new rights like abortion and gay marriage in penumbras and emanations and they can do the same thing to limit rights. A famous example of that was the "can't yell fire in a crowded theater" decision to limit free speech. That decision was actually used against WW1 anti-war protestors. A more recent example was the decision that went against the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even with what is supposed to be a conservative court, they apparently decided that the gay marriage right which was nowhere to be found in the text trumped the baker's explicit right to freedom of religion.

In other words, I guess I'm saying that the idea that the idea of the Bill of Rights guarantees us anything is a complete fiction. It was a noble attempt to limit the power of the government, maybe the best that could be done, but when all is said and done, the government (and that includes the Supreme Court), still has us by the balls and always will as long as there is a government. They make the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws (or choose not to in some cases like the border).

Veering back on topic however, I'm not aware that any of the COVID stuff, lockdowns, mandates, etc, has made it all the way to the Supreme Court yet but my guess is that even this conservative Supreme Court will pretty much let the governments get away with whatever they want to do because of the pandemic.
They ruled against the rent moratorium. Probably not in the category you were contemplating.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:42 pm

I Shrugged wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:22 pm
pp4me wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 am
Xan wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:55 pm
I believe pp4me's point is that if enough of the people in power actually don't care to protect some right, then it won't be protected, regardless of what the Bill of Rights says.
Yeah, that's what I meant.

Also, it's up to the Supreme Court to interpret the text and determine whether or not the Bill of Rights applies in specific situations. So all you need are enough activist judges on the court and they can say it means whatever they want. They find new rights like abortion and gay marriage in penumbras and emanations and they can do the same thing to limit rights. A famous example of that was the "can't yell fire in a crowded theater" decision to limit free speech. That decision was actually used against WW1 anti-war protestors. A more recent example was the decision that went against the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even with what is supposed to be a conservative court, they apparently decided that the gay marriage right which was nowhere to be found in the text trumped the baker's explicit right to freedom of religion.

In other words, I guess I'm saying that the idea that the idea of the Bill of Rights guarantees us anything is a complete fiction. It was a noble attempt to limit the power of the government, maybe the best that could be done, but when all is said and done, the government (and that includes the Supreme Court), still has us by the balls and always will as long as there is a government. They make the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws (or choose not to in some cases like the border).

Veering back on topic however, I'm not aware that any of the COVID stuff, lockdowns, mandates, etc, has made it all the way to the Supreme Court yet but my guess is that even this conservative Supreme Court will pretty much let the governments get away with whatever they want to do because of the pandemic.
They ruled against the rent moratorium. Probably not in the category you were contemplating.
And then, if memory serves me right even though it wasn't long ago, the Biden administration came up with a work around and said they would continue to do it any way.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Hal » Sat Sep 25, 2021 8:57 pm

pp4me wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:42 pm
I Shrugged wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:22 pm
pp4me wrote:
Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 am
Xan wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:55 pm
I believe pp4me's point is that if enough of the people in power actually don't care to protect some right, then it won't be protected, regardless of what the Bill of Rights says.
Yeah, that's what I meant.

Also, it's up to the Supreme Court to interpret the text and determine whether or not the Bill of Rights applies in specific situations. So all you need are enough activist judges on the court and they can say it means whatever they want. They find new rights like abortion and gay marriage in penumbras and emanations and they can do the same thing to limit rights. A famous example of that was the "can't yell fire in a crowded theater" decision to limit free speech. That decision was actually used against WW1 anti-war protestors. A more recent example was the decision that went against the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even with what is supposed to be a conservative court, they apparently decided that the gay marriage right which was nowhere to be found in the text trumped the baker's explicit right to freedom of religion.

In other words, I guess I'm saying that the idea that the idea of the Bill of Rights guarantees us anything is a complete fiction. It was a noble attempt to limit the power of the government, maybe the best that could be done, but when all is said and done, the government (and that includes the Supreme Court), still has us by the balls and always will as long as there is a government. They make the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws (or choose not to in some cases like the border).

Veering back on topic however, I'm not aware that any of the COVID stuff, lockdowns, mandates, etc, has made it all the way to the Supreme Court yet but my guess is that even this conservative Supreme Court will pretty much let the governments get away with whatever they want to do because of the pandemic.
They ruled against the rent moratorium. Probably not in the category you were contemplating.
And then, if memory serves me right even though it wasn't long ago, the Biden administration came up with a work around and said they would continue to do it any way.
Thanks for explaining that guys. Good background as I am watching Ken Burns Civil War series while in lockdown. Attached link for comparison => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAtn08gk2Yk
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by vnatale » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:17 pm

Last week I listened to a 1 1/4 hour podcast interview with the author of the below book.

If any of you want to listen to it...let me know and I will find it again on iTunes.

I think that no matter where you stand on any aspect of this virus...you will find agreement in many things he has to say.

In the next post I will post a long except from the beginning pages of the book to give you an idea of both that podcast and the book.

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Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by vnatale » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:18 pm

n New York City, fourth-year medical students at New York University Grossman School of Medicine were given the option of graduating early if they agreed to work on the hospital’s COVID wards.1 It was an eerie throwback to events that unfolded one hundred years earlier, during the Spanish flu, when Philadelphia—critically short of healthcare workers—pressed medical students into service.

In March 2020, it wasn’t only medical students who were thrust into improbable circumstances. New York City had become the initial epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In its hospitals, surgical residents were running makeshift intensive care units that were fashioned out of operating rooms. Pathology residents were reassigned to the medical wards.2 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which responds to national disasters, was asked to send eighty-five refrigeration trucks and personnel into the New York City medical examiner’s office, where there was a “desperate need” for burial services to help manage a cascade of dead bodies.3 To bolster its normal mortuary work, New York City added more than two hundred soldiers and airmen from the army and the national guard.4

New York State had issued a jarring directive urging EMS crews and other emergency service workers to forgo attempts to revive anyone without a pulse when they got to the scene of a medical emergency, amid the intolerable strain caused by COVID’s surge.5 Running short on ventilators, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital made the extraordinary decision to retrofit its breathing machines with 3-D printed plastic tubing that allowed doctors to ventilate two patients simultaneously, using the same device.6

I’d completed my medical training in New York City as a resident in internal medicine twenty years earlier, and I went to medical school at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Among my most vivid memories from training were covering the medical floors at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. The hospital was located in one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country, and the community’s rich culture deepened the complexity, and gratification, of practicing medicine there. I knew the hospital’s capable staff, and its immense capacity. Watching the scenes unfold—of Elmhurst Hospital being overrun with COVID patients, of refrigerator trucks parked outside, and of doctors and nurses describing their harrowing experiences—was hard to bear.

It was stunning, and it was shocking. But above all, it was terrifying. What my medical colleagues in the city described to me again and again was pervasive fear: Fear that they could spread the virus to their families, as each day New York hospitals were using as many masks, gloves, and gowns as they normally consumed in an entire month during usual times, quickly draining whatever stockpiles they had. Fear that they didn’t know how to care properly for the sick patients overwhelming their wards, suffering from a virus that nobody yet understood. Fear that they couldn’t predict how or when the arc of infection would start to ebb. And fear that a lot of lives would be lost.

It was a harrowing epidemic that brought the city’s vaunted healthcare system much closer to the brink of collapse than most people, even now, recognize.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-2) is the virus that causes the disease that we’ve come to know as COVID-19. By the time the first cases of community spread were diagnosed in late February, SARS-CoV-2 had already rooted itself in our communities. It had been here for a while, at least since January, replicating, spreading, and doubling its numbers every two to three days.7 Then, in March, after thousands of cases had accumulated, the virus abruptly burst into public view.

The virus didn’t arrive with a group of visitors from China, where it originated, or from Italy, where it established its next major foothold. Instead, it likely rode along the breath of probably hundreds of different travelers from a variety of locations, each ferrying the infection, and evading the porous controls that the federal government had put in place at US airports. At the time nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew how much virus was being carried by people who showed no outward symptoms of the disease. These were people who might never manifest any signs of illness but were still contagious. Without the ability to test people for the virus, we had no way of detecting its spread. We certainly had no way of stopping it.

This wasn’t because the United States had never imagined it might fall victim to a deadly pandemic. We certainly had imagined the possibility. In some respects, we had been preparing for this moment through three presidential administrations, starting with George W. Bush, who warned in a 2005 speech, following the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS-1, and then avian flu, that “scientists and doctors cannot tell us where or when the next pandemic will strike, or how severe it will be, but most agree: At some point, we are likely to face another pandemic. . . . Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland and time to prepare.”8 We had a pandemic playbook on the shelf, ran exercises simulating the threat countless times, and developed the Strategic National Stockpile to store the medical countermeasures that the top experts thought the country would need. But when the pandemic we long feared finally arrived, we weren’t ready. Many of the plans and preparations turned out to be a technocratic illusion. The stockpile lacked key essentials. A lot of what it contained didn’t work. It was a metaphor for our fragile response.

When I worked in the federal government in public health roles, we would say that planning for medical calamities provides you with no assurance that you’re prepared to deal with one. That was certainly true for COVID. The US never developed a pandemic strategy that would be broadly relevant to a range of predictable and unexpected viral threats, and the country was slow to realize the ways in which the plan we had created and tried to work from, which focused almost exclusively on the risk from flu, wouldn’t apply to COVID. The federal government started off in a weak position, with plans that were ill suited to countering a coronavirus. This mismatch between the scenarios we drilled for and the reality that we faced left us unprepared. Poor execution turned it into a public health tragedy.

It was an alarming state of vulnerability for a country with the world’s most technologically advanced healthcare system. Owing to mistakes in how we deployed diagnostic tests for COVID, we left ourselves blind to the virus and allowed it to spread widely and largely unchecked, so we were never able to trace its early spread and contain it. Even when the shortcomings became obvious, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continued to rely on its systems for monitoring and responding to influenza, insisting even into 2021 that its flu-based interventions were the right tools in the fight against COVID. We didn’t pursue an approach that closely tied our efforts to track and contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to the characteristics of the virus. This central shortcoming explains many of the gaps in our response to the pandemic we actually faced.

Yet COVID shouldn’t have been such a surprise. There had been earlier outbreaks of new and deadly strains of coronavirus. COVID’s close cousin, SARS-1, appeared in 2002 and spread threateningly in 2003, and another dangerous coronavirus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, emerged ten years later. Moreover, the scientific literature over the last decade is riddled with reports of SARS-like coronaviruses that were found in bats and appeared to have the potential to sicken humans.

In 2012, six people developed an illness with symptoms matching COVID after clearing bat feces from an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan, a province in southwestern China that’s one of the country’s most biologically diverse regions.9 Three of the patients died. Chinese government scientists sampled from the caves coronaviruses that may have caused the outbreak, but those specimens were never shared, and officials maintained that the culprit was an unspecified fungus.10

And while the results of official investigations into the outbreak were never fully revealed, a group of Chinese researchers, working independently, would later conclude that the probable culprit was a SARS-like coronavirus that originated from Chinese horseshoe bats.11 A coronavirus that later became known as RaTG13, judged to be the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, was sampled from the same mineshaft.12

In 2013, scientists reported on two novel coronaviruses isolated from bats in China that closely resembled SARS-1 and bound tightly to the same angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor that lines the human respiratory tract, the same route through which the SARS-CoV-2 virus would gain entry into our cells.13

In 2016, scientists reported on another novel coronavirus, also closely related to SARS-1, that also showed the ability to infect human cells.14

There have been other accounts of outbreaks of unusual respiratory illnesses among people who frequented the caves in southern China that were home to bats known to carry coronaviruses highly similar to SARS-1.15 In 2018, researchers sampled the blood of Chinese citizens who lived near these caves and discovered that about 3 percent of the local population had antibodies to coronaviruses that had never been previously identified.16 Any one of these spillover events could have been a predecessor to SARS-CoV-2, testing humans for the first time.

Scientists issued repeated warnings that one of these novel coronaviruses could start to circulate widely. They cautioned that a disease could emerge that had the same deadly features of SARS-1 but was more easily spread, threatening nations. But SARS-1 had disappeared, and MERS never developed the capacity to transfer easily between people. So the warnings prompted only passing actions that sputtered once the immediate threats seemed to subside.

And even if a disease like COVID could have been foreseen, we still wouldn’t have been ready for it. We needed an approach that prepared us for unforeseen risks and focused on establishing core capabilities and not just trying to guess which virus will threaten us. We shouldn’t accept that we’ll be able to anticipate the next threat or that even a predictable risk (like a pandemic strain of flu) won’t adapt in some sinister way that allows it to slip past our countermeasures.

So, instead of assuming that actions designed to combat flu would be effective in countering any pandemic, we should have drawn from our experience with SARS-1, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and other infections, to remember that strategies must be closely tied to the biology of diseases that we’re trying to mitigate. These include the biological features related to the way pathogens spread and the social factors that contribute to transmission.17

These insights should have shaped a preparedness agenda where our policies corresponded to some of the common characteristics shared by different viral threats. We needed to create plans and countermeasures that aligned with aspects of risk that were threaded across a broad range of the potential dangers, rather than wrongly assuming that our tactics could be safely adapted from the preparations we had made for a pandemic involving influenza. We now must learn from our mistakes and approach future pandemics with an altogether different mind-set. We need to tie our future strategies to the epidemiology and biology of diverse categories of potential threats and the social construction of disease. This will arm us with the capability to implement a more flexible response that can counter a fuller set of conceivable threats, including new viruses as well as new strains of known viruses that may have evolved in dangerous ways. Then we need to fashion interventions that target the social and geographic communities where the advance of a novel disease is most likely to occur.

In contrast to diseases spread largely via droplets or contaminated surfaces, where transmission from each infected person is to a smaller number of individuals, for diseases like COVID—with some degree of aerosol transmission, where a lot of the spread is from a small number of superspreaders and where the risk is typically from indoor environments with poor airflow and filtration—these dangers will require a different set of interventions. Pathogens with different incubation periods will need to be planned for differently. So will diseases that can spread through asymptomatic transmission. This is just some of the foundation on which a flexible approach to pandemic preparedness will have to be constructed.
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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vnatale
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by vnatale » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:34 pm

My recent mask wearing observations...

1) Yesterday I was at "The Big E" (Eastern States Exposition). I'm sure that there were over 100,000 attending at various points during the day. There were many modes of communications letting us now that we were all required to wear masks when inside a building.

There seemed to be high compliance in the smaller six New England state buildings. I got out of wearing one in four of them by buying a cider slush in the New Hampshire state building that took a long time to drink. While I was "eating" I was not required to wear a mask.

In the much larger buildings...I estimate compliance at 20% or less.

2) This morning I had two softball games in Northampton, MA. To give you an idea how liberal Northampton is...there was an issue of Newsweek in the early 90s wherein Northampton made it's front cover with the cover story: "Northampton: Gay Capital of the World."

Just before the season we were informed that we needed to be wearing masks when we were congregated together at the bench areas. Today was our third Sunday of playing double-headers. From the first game I've seen practically no one wearing a mask. The only person today I saw wearing one was the first game umpire. And, he never said a word to us about us wearing one.

3) After the game I went with my friend to a pizza place in Northampton. I could not get a parking spot near it and had to park behind the row of buildings on Main Street. To get to Main Street from that parking lot I had to go in and out of a large multi-story building full of various stores (I was the building's accountant in the 70s).

When I went to the back door entrance to the building I saw the prominent sign stating that all must be wearing masks in the building with no exceptions. I saw a lot of people in that building in my wanderings through it trying to find my way out of it and on to Main Street. There was complete 100% compliance in that building.
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:22 pm

Before the Delta surge in Florida, mask wearing had nearly disappeared at the stores to the point where if you were wearing one you got the "why are you still wearing a mask" stare. Then, when Delta arrived, things gradually shifted the other way again and my wife was even asked by some old fart in the check out line why she wasn't wearing a mask.

Now masks seem to have gone completely out of style again, rather quickly BTW.

I guess you don't have to check the COVID stats any more. You can tell how things are going (whether real or panic-porn driven) just by seeing how many people are wearing masks.

The store employees still wear them, of course. Wonder if that will ever end.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Mon Sep 27, 2021 3:16 pm

vnatale wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:17 pm
Last week I listened to a 1 1/4 hour podcast interview with the author of the below book.
{scott gottlieb’s uncontrolled spread]
Was it Harry Shearer?
Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by jalanlong » Mon Sep 27, 2021 4:50 pm

pp4me wrote:
Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:22 pm
Before the Delta surge in Florida, mask wearing had nearly disappeared at the stores to the point where if you were wearing one you got the "why are you still wearing a mask" stare. Then, when Delta arrived, things gradually shifted the other way again and my wife was even asked by some old fart in the check out line why she wasn't wearing a mask.

Now masks seem to have gone completely out of style again, rather quickly BTW.

I guess you don't have to check the COVID stats any more. You can tell how things are going (whether real or panic-porn driven) just by seeing how many people are wearing masks.

The store employees still wear them, of course. Wonder if that will ever end.
Here in North Texas there is still a lot of mask wearing and general fear of the virus. In my county pretty much no business requires masks any longer. Not even schools. Medical facilities are about the only place left. But even with that I would estimate 50% of people are wearing masks and close to 95% in my son's school. That includes the requisite people in their cars alone wearing a mask or people out jogging by themselves wearing masks.

If you drive about 2 miles over into Dallas County, they still have a mask mandate going (although it is in legal dispute with the governor). Most all businesses have masks signs up and adherence is close to 100%
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