Coronavirus COVID-19

[user]

7 hours ago, rhmilo said:

Government is actually doing their best, but they're confronted with a a population that has a large and very loud contingent of whining entitled sissies that's making it very hard to get anything done.

They've been telling people to work from home since March but because you can't actually have police in every office building to enforce this, people keep coming in to work at their seriously non-essential bullshit jobs.

They've been telling people to limit their social interaction since September but because you can't very well have police checking behind every front door to enforce this, people keep hanging out with friends and family and spreading COVID-19 that way.

They've been telling people to stop traveling to foreign countries since May but because you can't very well ground every civilian airplane without seriously disrupting international freight transport (which for a large part makes use of civilian airplanes) people decide to go on trips abroad anyway.

 

Unlike China, the Netherlands - and other Western European countries, which are all going through the same thing now - is not a police state. This seriously limits what the government can do.

 

Head of public health going public with his doubts about the efficacy of face masks the day their use was made mandatory is a big  though. In that you're right.

Yeah, I think the government put way too much trust in the ability of people to self regulate. Typical vvd stance imho. 
Should have been stricter from the beginning. Also take issue with the huge list of shops that are exempt from the measures. They should have closed everything except for pharmacies and supermarkets. You can buy petfood at a supermarket. 
 

I’m not anti gov. I sympathise with Mark but he needs to stop being half assed and stop worrying about draagvlak. 
 

edit:

Not gonna delete my posts but I regret the tone and sentiment and general short sightedness. I’m really stressed about losing my income and feel frustrated about the whole situation. 
But clearly there is only one right thing to do and that’s to comply with the new measures. I’ll be reporting my employer tomorrow. Feels weird, even though he’s a cunt. But then again so am I. 

Edited December 16, 2020 by user

[Braintree]

Recently, I was thinking about the amount of carbon in the air after lighting incense and thought maybe that could affect the transmission of the virus. I asked a friend who's a neuroscientist and he linked me to a study that shows evidence of high humidity lowering transmission rate:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238339

I'm not versed in chemistry and epidemiology so reading some of these studies is rather difficult. I think this carbon idea is interesting but not sure if it holds up.

5 hours ago, randomsummer said:

It's finally hitting hard in my hometown area (rural Ohio).  I think it's hitting especially hard there because Ohio actually locked down early on when things were starting to get bad in the NE and NYC areas.  They probably didn't have to lock down just yet, but they did it anyway, and as a result everyone there has serious lockdown fatigue and is going all, "fuck it I'm going out and eating in a restaurant and walking around with no mask and getting together with my family".

Just heard that a bunch of my old friends' parents have it.  Some are in more serious condition than others.  I was hoping to go home and see my folks for the holidays but that's not going to happen now.

I know a few people in Columbus that contracted it. Oddly enough, my friends that have been working in the service industry haven't gotten it yet. Other than going to work, they don't do shit though.

[Alcofribas]

i'm aware of a bar in my city that built walls inside their building to block the view from outside. between the windows and these inner walls they've made it look like they are closed - empty tables with chairs stacked on top etc. but behind the wall they are a fully functional operation including live music which is a complete violation of city ordinance. regularly cop cars sit outside this place...presumably to make sure they can do this without being bothered. it's cool when cops could be useful in this case they're just contributing to more social degeneration and lawlessness. love to see this.

edit: in this state there are almost 900k infections and over 14k dead

Edited December 16, 2020 by Alcofribas

[Braintree]

6 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

i'm aware of a bar in my city that built walls inside their building to block the view from outside. between the windows and these inner walls they've made it look like they are closed - empty tables with chairs stacked on top etc. but behind the wall they are a fully functional operation including live music which is a complete violation of city ordinance. regularly cop cars sit outside this place...presumably to make sure they can do this without being bothered. it's cool when cops could be useful in this case they're just contributing to more social degeneration and lawlessness. love to see this.

edit: in this state there are almost 900k infections and over 14k dead

 

[Limo]

8 hours ago, user said:

. I’m really stressed about losing my income and feel frustrated about the whole situation. 
But clearly there is only one right thing to do and that’s to comply with the new measures. I’ll be reporting my employer tomorrow. Feels weird, even though he’s a cunt. But then again so am I. 

Sorry to hear this. Hope you manage ok and that our famed social security safety net does what it needs to do for you.

[Soloman Tump]

And in amongst the plague chaos, I am moving this weekend.  A chain of 5 properties all trying to move nontheless! Madness.  Been trying to do it all year.  Dang you Nurgle.

All it will take is for one person to get covid / need to self isolate, including movers, solicitors, estate agents and our families... and the whole thing could fall apart.

This has been the most stressful thing I have had to do in years, but the end result should be a better life and less work stress.

Hold tight, see you on the flip side.

Also: I realise there are shedloads of people in worse off situations than me.  Just needed to vent. Stay safe / strong.

[Extralife]

5 minutes ago, Soloman Tump said:

And in amongst the plague chaos, I am moving this weekend.  A chain of 5 properties all trying to move nontheless! Madness.  Been trying to do it all year.  Dang you Nurgle.

All it will take is for one person to get covid / need to self isolate, including movers, solicitors, estate agents and our families... and the whole thing could fall apart.

This has been the most stressful thing I have had to do in years, but the end result should be a better life and less work stress.

Hold tight, see you on the flip side.

Also: I realise there are shedloads of people in worse off situations than me.  Just needed to vent. Stay safe / strong.

I also moved this year...and it was not easy. But we got through it and still all here in one piece. Hang in there, bud.

[drome]

Yeah....?

[IDEM]

3 hours ago, drome said:

Yeah....?

Nice use of the (indispensable) direct address comma.

[psn]

Comma chomelion

[thumbass]

Look i really didn't wanna start this discussion but:

Aphex Twin is unrelated to this post.

End of story 

Ik know i might get hate for this but idc

 

 

 

 

Edited December 18, 2020 by thumbass
Look

[Dragon]

christmas in the UK now completely fucked. PM Boris Johnson pulls a full 180 U-turn on the five-day visiting period which families have been promised for weeks.

this could've been achieved by imposing a higher restriction in the first weeks of december. but the tory govt. couldn't get their shit together, couldn't make decisions on anything twenty minutes into the future, and now millions of people will not get to see their families.

my heart goes out to everyone who now has to make drastic and/or dangerous changes to their christmas plans. as of midnight tonight the UK is in lockdown, and December 25th is the only day you can visit another household.

[Rubin Farr]

A new variant of COVID discovered in U.K. that spreads more efficiently among humans, possibly 70% more transmissible:

https://apple.news/AAWYGWRtrT2yT50FVMQAWrQ

[MaartenVC]

12 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

A new variant of COVID discovered in U.K. that spreads more efficiently among humans, possibly 70% more transmissible:

https://apple.news/AAWYGWRtrT2yT50FVMQAWrQ

If that's the case this new variant will soon replace the original strain as it seems to be way more effective in spreading, as it's already doing as I read.
They assume the vaccine for the original strain will also work on this new strain, but that's usually not the case for mutations, isn't it?
They better start doing some vaccine-tests on this new strain quickly...

[Enthusiast]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/health/coronavirus-britain-variant.html

Quote

Officials in Britain and South Africa claim new variants are more easily transmitted. There’s a lot more to the story, scientists say.

Just as vaccines begin to offer hope for a path out of the pandemic, officials in Britain on Saturday sounded an urgent alarm about what they called a highly contagious new variant of the coronavirus circulating in England.

Citing the rapid spread of the virus through London and surrounding areas, Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed the country’s most stringent lockdown since March. “When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defense,” he said.

In South Africa, a similar version of the virus has emerged, which seems to share some of the mutations seen in the British variant. That virus has been found in 90 percent of the samples whose genetic sequences have been analyzed in South Africa.

Scientists are worried about these variants, but not surprised by them. Researchers have recorded thousands of tiny modifications in the genetic material of the coronavirus as it has hopscotched across the world.

Some variants become more common in a population simply by luck, not because the changes somehow supercharge the virus. But as it becomes more difficult for the pathogen to survive — because of vaccinations and growing immunity in human populations — researchers also expect the virus to gain useful mutations enabling it to spread more easily or to escape detection by the immune system.

“It’s a real warning that we need to pay closer attention,” Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “Certainly these mutations are going to spread and definitely, the scientific community — we need to monitor these mutations and we need to characterize which ones have effects.”

The British variant has 23 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. These mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit more efficiently, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.

But the estimate of greater transmissibility — British officials said the variant was as much as 70 percent more transmissible — is based on modeling and has not been confirmed by lab experiments, Dr. Cevik added.

“Over all, I think we need to have a little bit more experimental data,” she said. “We can’t entirely rule out the fact that some of this transmissibility data might be related to human behavior.”

In South Africa, too, scientists were quick to note that human behavior was driving the epidemic, not new mutations whose effect on transmissibility has yet to be quantified.

The British announcement also prompted concern that the virus may evolve to become resistant to the vaccines just now rolling out. The worries are focused on a pair of alterations in the viral genetic code that may make it less vulnerable to certain antibodies.

But several experts urged caution, saying it would take years, not months, for the virus to evolve enough to render the current vaccines impotent.

“No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless,” Dr. Bloom said.

“It is going to be a process that occurs over the time scale of multiple years and requires the accumulation of multiple viral mutations,” he added. “It’s not going to be like an on-off switch.”

Like all viruses, the coronavirus is a shape-shifter — sometimes at random and sometimes by clever design.

Scientists fear the latter possibility, especially: The vaccination of millions of people may exert enormous pressure on the virus to become resistant to the immune response, setting back the global fight by years.

Already, there are small changes in the virus that have arisen independently multiple times across the world, suggesting the mutations are helpful to the pathogen. The mutation affecting antibody susceptibility — technically called the 69–70 deletion, meaning there are missing letters in the genetic code — has been seen at least three times: in Danish minks, in people in Britain, and in an immune-suppressed patient who became much less sensitive to convalescent plasma.

“This thing’s transmitting, it’s acquiring, it’s adapting all the time,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, who last week detailed the deletion’s recurrent emergence and spread. “But people don’t want to hear what we say, which is: This virus will mutate.”

The new genetic deletion changes the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus, which it needs to infect human cells. Variants of the virus with this deletion arose independently in Thailand and Germany in early 2020, and became prevalent in Denmark and England in August.

Scientists initially thought the new coronavirus was stable and unlikely to escape vaccine-induced immune response, said Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London.

“But it’s become very clear over the last several months that mutations can occur,” she said. “As selection pressure increases with mass vaccination, I think these mutants will become more common.”

Several recent papers have shown that the coronavirus can evolve to avoid recognition by a single monoclonal antibody, a cocktail of two antibodies or even convalescent serum given to a specific individual.

Fortunately, the body’s entire immune system is a much more formidable adversary.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines induce an immune response only to the spike protein carried by the coronavirus on its surface. But each infected person produces a large, unique and complex repertoire of antibodies to this protein.

“The fact is that you have a thousand big guns pointed at the virus,” said Kartik Chandran, a virologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “No matter how the virus twists and weaves, it’s not that easy to find a genetic solution that can really combat all these different antibody specificities, not to mention the other arms of the immune response.”

In short: It will be very hard for the coronavirus to escape the body’s defenses, despite the many variations it may adopt.

Escape from immunity requires that a virus accumulate a series of mutations, each allowing the pathogen to erode the effectiveness of the body’s defenses. Some viruses, like influenza, amass those changes relatively quickly. But others, like the measles virus, collect hardly any of the alterations.

Even the influenza virus needs five to seven years to collect enough mutations to escape immune recognition entirely, Dr. Bloom noted. His lab on Friday published a new report showing that common cold coronaviruses also evolve to escape immune detection — but over many years.

The scale of the infections in this pandemic may be quickly generating diversity in the new coronavirus. Still, the vast majority of people worldwide have yet to be infected, and that has made scientists hopeful.

“It would be a little surprising to me if we were seeing active selection for immune escape,” said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

“In a population that’s still mostly naïve, the virus just doesn’t need to do that yet,” she said. “But it’s something we want to watch out for in the long term, especially as we start getting more people vaccinated.”

Immunizing about 60 percent of a population within about a year, and keeping the number of cases down while that happens, will help minimize the chances of the virus mutating significantly, Dr. Hodcroft said.

Still, scientists will need to closely track the evolving virus to spot mutations that might give it an edge over vaccines.

Scientists routinely monitor mutations in flu viruses in order to update vaccines, and should do the same for the coronavirus, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“You can imagine a process like exists for the flu vaccine, where you’re swapping in these variants and everyone’s getting their yearly Covid shot,” he said. “I think that’s what generally will be necessary.”

The good news is that the technology used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is much easier to adjust and update than conventional vaccines. The new vaccines also generate a massive immune response, so the coronavirus may need many mutations over years before the vaccines must be tweaked, Dr. Bedford said.

In the meantime, he and other experts said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government agencies should set up a national system to link viral sequence databases with on-the-ground data — like whether an infection occurred despite vaccination.

“These are useful pokes for scientists and governments to get systems in place — now, before we might need them, especially as we start vaccinating people,” Dr. Hodcroft said. “But the public should not necessarily be panicking.”

 

[zkom]

Mutations were inevitable. Luckily corona viruses are pretty slow to mutate compared to for example influenza viruses so yearly vaccinations should not be required like in the case of influenza that has new vaccine resistant variants circulating every year.

The Brits really seem to be now getting isolated into their islands however. Mainland Europe cutting off flights and otherwise restricting travel from UK.

[Cryptowen]

holiday 2020 festive montage video set to this track:

 

[Guest]

 

[iococoi]

Covid cases recorded in Antarctica for first time – reports

[psn]

Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting!

[dingformung]

horebukk

 

[Soloman Tump]

What if it keeps mutating and kills us all

[zkom]

Meet the People Getting Off on Covid-19 Nasal Swabs

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-test-nasal-swabs-nussy-1105797/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[jaderpansen]

might get vaxxed on sunday, fingers crossed.

[whosebrian]