Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

Just google it and see if you buy it. <shrug>

 

At this point, with as much spread as it's had... there should be far more than three "strains" by now. Most viruses mutate at absurd rates, and differentiating strains is... I'd say 'more art than science', but the process doesn't even meet the standards of 'art'. More like a game of darts* after a couple bottles of the other corona.

That said, I *sincerely* doubt there's any validity to the 'three strains' listed here. To start with, it takes longer than this outbreak's been active to properly sequence viral DNA, let alone sequence enough samples from enough separate cases then put them into the shared databases and run full analysis of the mutations and only then can the experts make up some arbitrary criteria for when enough mutations have occurred to consider it a new strain.

And all of that is especially true of the Coronavirus family- RNA viruses mutate faster and are harder to sequence than DNA viruses, and Coronaviruses have one of the largest genetic strings of all retroviruses.

It also doesn't really matter... diversified Wuhan Flu strains doesn't create any more or less legitimate risk in humans. If anything, we'd be better off if there are more strains... it means one will eventually mutate to be nearly harmless, and we can intentionally infect everyone with that "benign" strain, should all other attempts at developing a vaccine fail (same way we used cowpox to fight smallpox). Because the same antibodies will work on all of them.

So, ultimately, this ranges from an irrelevant to positive event... assuming it's true at all...

*

Spoiler: A rant about identifying strains and how it's a failure no matter what you do.

Trying to determine where one 'strain' ends and another begins is tricky enough in higher sexual organisms like plants or animals- depending on how you ask the question, there's anything between One and Fifty races of humans on Earth (and we're an unusually inbred species to begin with)... and then there is the taxonomical nightmare which we have turned dogs into... I promise you, if we didn't know better, our scientists wouldn't consider pugs and great danes to be the same genus, let alone species.

And sexual organisms are the *easiest* groups to differentiate with, since we can use 'reproductive viability' as a criteria. Things get exponentially worse when we start discussing asexual species. Even higher order asexual species like certain plants.

Once we start discussing the highly mutative unicellular organisms like bacteria... it borders on impossible to differentiate strains, since the only scientific absolutes are current gene sequences. And while DNA is indisputable, our ability to understand what it means is exceedingly limited. Like hieroglyphics before the Rosetta Stone... the characters are clearly etched, but that don't mean we can read them.

And at least bacteria are alive by the standard definition. Viruses are in a class of their own where all lessons one might derive from (other) lifeforms break down into utter nonsense. As such, virus classifications are more guesswork than anything, and often less about their genes, and more about their behaviors (not that this works all that well, either) and strains are rarely useful for anything other than tracking vectors.

 

Yeah... that looks like a pretty typical viral mutation pattern. At least, for the fast ones like influenza and coronavirus. If it's not accurate, then the accurate one will still look an awful lot like it.

Nor should you. Any possible differentiation one could invent at our current technological level is arbitrary at best and misleading at worst. It's a useful tool for tracking the "ancestry" of vectors, and thus other at-risk locations, and that's all it can be trusted to do.

 

Some recent COVID-19 meme images:

All images were found in the "Most Viral" section, of course.

 

Yeah, like nearly four months into this thing I finally start doing something productive.

 

Yeah.

It's part of a larger message:

- Advertisers prey upon insecurity and misinformation.

- Making you feel bad about yourself is how they sell you a better feeling.

- This sort of systemic dishonesty seems to be ignored when things are going well because we're conned into thinking we benefit from it, or we ignore it because we're doing well and it can't make us feel bad when we're doing well, but during a crisis like this one it becomes both too obvious a lie, and too costly an expense, to be ignored.


Nobody is doing well. We shouldn't support the industries built upon making ourselves feel worse -- probably we should have never supported them, but right now for sure we should drop that mental and economic burden.

 

Writing fanfics is a coping mechanism. It should be more socially accepted after this.

 

So do people know that China is seeming to be banning African colored people from businesses.
Macdonalds had to apologize about their China branches doing it.here is a link.

 

Now this delves into rule 8 territory, so without going into great detail... there is absolutely nothing new about this sort of behavior in China. No small number of businesses have been recorded doing this ever since roughly the mid 90s when, for whatever incomprehensible reason, black people started migrating to China.

I mean... I guess it's probably still better than living in Africa...

The only thing notable about it this time is that this time it was some McDonald's franchise owner. I promise, if they wandered the streets of any significant Chinese city (except maybe Hong Kong), they'd find dozens of similar signs. And they'd have found them a decade ago, or two decades ago.

And the only reason you wouldn't have found them before then is because most Chinese people had never once seen a black person at that point.

 

In belated news, Uusimaa lockdown in Finland was lifted early on Wednesday. So I guess while my Easter was ruined, at least my winter holiday after next week might go better.

 

Yeah, but then the weeks after when all those people are infected will be much worse.

 

Possibly, time will tell. Suffice to say, since the lockdown was no longer deemed necessary, it had to be lifted immediately. It served its purpose to buy time to scale up intensive care capacity. And rest of Finland is not clean of the virus either.

 

Whelp, I assure you the world watches to see what lessons can be learned from this turn of events.

 

The problem with that is that the world is very good at forgetting lessons and with great gusto too. It is not possible to do in major cities but but if America itself followed the example of Gunnison, Colorado during the Spanish Flu we would have already been done with the virus a month ago in every other portion of the country without even having an issue with the lack of medical supplies.

 

That, and, well, if the only lesson to be learned from this is "As soon as you lift restrictions everything will start all over again" then that lesson really teaches us nothing that we can use, since facts still are we can't be locked up forever.

 

So, people seem to forget that the point of the lockdown was never to kill the virus. That ship sailed loooooong ago. We probably would have had to catch it back in January, when China was lying about things, to kill it before it spread. The point of the lockdown was 'flattening the curve'. As in trying to keep the infection from becoming overwhelming.

People are going to get infected. As a society we have to balance the damage through lockdown vs the damage without lockdown.

Though based on what I'm seeing statistic wise I'm not sure our lockdown measures actually did anything aside from make people mad. I haven't looked into the statistics that much aside from glancing though. Part of it's the fact that a lot of the stats out there are horribly off if you look at the methodology. I have a sneaking suspicion that the infection rate is something like 10X the actual reported rate.

 

The lockdown in America was completely disorganized and incompetent, considering we have four (4) regional groups of states "organizing reopening the economy" its pretty simple to say the Federal Government washed its hands of the situation and did nothing to help.

Since we're still at Wave 1 and Wave 2 is expected when the first "reopenings" start we probably haven't seen half of the total deaths in America.

South Korea/Taiwan are the only two democracies coming out looking competent from this, fast, effective responses with lockdowns used to buy time to get effective testing and contact tracing online.

America did neither of those things and is all out of ideas, in fact we've managed to start reducing the # of tests we're performing. Can't be a pandemic if people are dying without testing.

 

Personally I have to say I doubt this was really much more than 2-5 times worse than a typical bad flu year (~500,000 deaths worldwide). More and more is coming out about short selling scams run by people close to the officials who announced the lockdown, hypocritical (and politically convenient) u-turns from opposition leaders who said this was irrelevant in February to saying it's the end of the world now, and completely misleading record keeping of the deaths counting people who committed suicide by jumping off a building as coronavirus deaths because their corpse tested positive. (If we counted everyone who died with a common cold as a flu death how would that effect statistics?)

Now I'm going along with this, because like a lot of people a few weeks free time at home isn't a bad thing for me, but I'm pretty sure that when we look back at this we're going to see no real difference between the countries that run massive lockdowns and the ones that didn't bother. Maybe road deaths will be lower because most people weren't going anywhere. We're dumb, easily panicked, herd animals, when it comes down to it and if the US elections weren't coming in November I really doubt he media would have exploded on us the way it did about this when it didn't bother about Swine or Bird flu that were probably about as bad.

It would be nice to think that we'll keep some useful habits from this though, like making it socially acceptable to wear masks in public while sick or expecting people to keep some emergency food and supplies on hand. Unfortunately I expect it's more likely we all go back to normal except now our phones are tracked now and we get micro chipped in our mandatory vaccinations.

 

The simplest thing is to compare Sweden to other nations.

Sweden low-key adopted the herd immunity approach and it hasn't done them any favors.

Its a pandemic so our choices are:
1) Close economy, keep people at home, get measures in place so it doesn't spread exponentially and slowly reopen things
2) YOLO Economy, it spreads exponentially, economy closes from panic/deaths/worldwide slowdown due to pandemic
Either way the world economy dies as service industries collapse. 1 might keep more people alive, 2 is just running face first into a brick wall while pretending its made of sugar glass.

 

Now these are quickly googled results, but they match what I've heard elsewhere.

In 'Deaths per Million Population' Sweden is behind France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Belguim and other first world countries. [Source 2]

We're still only at 1,500 deaths related to the virus as per wikipedia and a lot of other sources.

Around 90,000 people die every year in Sweden anyway, ^{so about 7,500 is the expected rate of death in any given month. We need to judge the importance of Corona from that figure, and precisely who it targets. If an illness cuts a year off the end of my life while I'm suffering a poor quality of life anyway I'm less bothered than if it cuts me down as a happy five year old with a whole live ahead of me, for example. "Quality of life years lost" or whatever they call that officially.}

Everything considered I don't think we'll be able to say they did much worse in corona deaths than anyone else did when this is done, while they'll have done a lot better in everything else.

 

I'll disagree with the notion that it's 2-5 times the Flu mostly due to the extreme response that several countries like China have taken that would ordinarily devastate their entire economy for little gain. That isn't to say that it is people are not overinflating numbers at times or that people are not taking advantage of the panic and it is rather annoying and sad that they do such things in a crisis.

I also doubt it'll be a complete back to normal within a year period because logistics and contextual culture will be different for a year or two. Restaurants will have different seating and occupancy rules. Airports will have drastically lowered client numbers. Many small businesses will be gone forever and lots of previously secure businesses will now be considered excessive and dangerous oppulence. There will also likely be more homeless next year due to the lack of rent and employment. Times will be rough for a while.

That being said I would be wary of any new vaccine and I would outright reject any proposed miracle procedure with a microchip. A rushed vaccine runs into the issues of how it will be mass produced and maintain quality without adversely affecting the person being injected. As for the microchip, that sounds like a corporate wet dream to gain billions off of senseless patch updates and invasive spying on people's porn stashes.

 

In China's case I'd suspect it was more economically motivated than anything else. The death rate there does seem to have been higher, for whatever reason, but they had economic motives for big action. Their economy depends on foreign investment and if everyone thought China had this huge pandemic going on they'd move the money out and start buying elsewhere. So they tried to make a big move on Wuhen and when it failed started lying about their numbers and bribing the WHO to keep quiet until it became a worldwide problem and no-one had anywhere to move out of China to. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the CCP put a few coughing agents on planes to India, Pakistan or Germany when they saw how the western media was treating this.

I doubt it'd work but if the cops are harassing people for sitting in their gardens, arresting them for not wearing masks and fining pastors for holding drive-in sermons I absolutely believe the government could get away with mandatory vaccines. The phone data is almost certainly already collected illegally by the intelligence agencies (we got that from Assange, and his head rolled for it) they just can't use it to prosecute people in open court yet, so that could get pushed through. Microchips I'm less sure about. I don't know what it's really worth compared to phone tracking, but it keeps coming up in the coverage like we're being prepared for it.

 

That is not how you measure the danger from a pandemic. It's the mortality rate that's relevant. Not the absolute number of deaths. Not the deaths per capita. Look at the deaths per total cases. Mortality rate combined with the spread rate will tell you how dangerous it is.

Are you asserting that all western countries are doing that, or at least that it's widespread enough to majorly distort the statistics? Because such coordination seems implausible.

Flat out wrong. The mortality rate of Swine flu was about the same as that of most seasonal flus, around 0.1%, so nobody cared. As for Bird flu, I'm assuming you meant the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic even though that was not derived from avian influenza. That had a mortality rate of 9-10% which is worse than the current pandemic, but it was much easier to contain and only about 8000 cases were recorded worldwide.

The mortality rate of the current China virus is currently unclear due to incomplete data, but all signs point to it being >5%.

Western populations are stupid enough to put up with a lot, but blatant "this app is tracking you" phone tracking and fucking microchips are both way too far. There's major pushback right now even with the pandemic still ongoing.

 

Anyone who feels this all isn't a big deal can go do whatever, but I'm keeping myself and my father on lockdown until I am 100% sure that this shit is actually done. Thus far, the talking heads have done exactly nothing to assure me that the end of this is even in sight.

 

Selection effect is one of the fundamental issues in any statistic, including mortality. There are only small portions of the number of people who're very likely already infected being tested, most of them the already-dead or those who need intensive care. The 'mortality rate' is massively skewed by the way the information's being collected. If you tested seasonal flu the same way you'd get a similar result, and we don't panic over that do we?

On a medical level tests get rationed because there's so few of them. Why would a doctor give a test to someone with the sniffles? On the government level now they're committed what incentive is there for any politician seeking re-election to admit any evidence they overreacted and lost voters jobs and businesses? They've got to maintain they saved everyone's lives now if they're in power or say every death after the end of lockdown is blood on the government's hands if they're in opposition.

I really doubt the rate is anything like that, I expect they'll fall hugely in retrospect when we have better estimates of the number of infected, and the total death numbers are weak evidence of that. 250,000-500,000 is the average number of deaths from seasonal flu and we're at something like 160,000 Coronavirus deaths now it seems very unlikely we get to an upper limit of even 5 times the average.

It seems far more likely that we're going to realise this is a bad joke stirred up by the media, like the dangers of terrorism, which eats up public attention, hundreds of billions of dollars and the public's rights but just doesn't compare to something less sexy road deaths or the effects of obesity.

Your phone is already tracked by your phone provider. Whenever you go anywhere, unless you remove your phone's battery or keep it in a faraday cage, your phone is always sending signals to the nearest tower. The whole metadata scandal after the leaks was the idea that phone companies were handing that data to intelligence agencies, or having it stolen by allied agencies who gave it to your agency that wasn't legally allowed to spy domestically, who used the data to track your movements. They just couldn't use that openly because it was illegal information.

 

Okay. Why are you so certain everything is fine and there's nothing to worry about? Do you have actual data that says so, or is this an ideological thing you're parroting from whatever talking heads you subscribe to?

 

Why do you believe authority figures who've made this exact same mistake before to huge cost for us? The incentives all line up for them to profit from this without it having to be anything like they claim it is.

 

I don't care about conspiracy theories. If you have real data, present it.