Boris Johnson tells UK to prepare for Salt & Vinegar crisps Brexit. North Korea throws shade.

[[McD] James]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/britain-eu-brexit-impasse-1.5764905

 

 

What even is this year? Nothing seems real anymore. 

[Bauul]

I'm pretty sure that's a parody Twitter feed.

[Doomkid]

Wanted to be 100% sure it was a parody account and quickly ended up loling multiple times

 

 

[Murdoch]

Quote

“Re-tweet” by

@DPRK_News

of theory that Donald Trump was secretly lobotomized and his brain fed to Siamese Cat named Squeaky Norman is not necessarily endorsement.

 

Gold.

[smeghammer]

2 hours ago, Ajora said:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/britain-eu-brexit-impasse-1.5764905

 

 

What even is this year? Nothing seems real anymore. 

 

I have to live in the same country as this dickhead.

 

Government seems to be placing 'getting back to normal' over expert epidemiology advice. And, oh look - the spread is accelerating again (the infamous  'r' value). Just to be clear - WE DON'T HAVE A CURE YET.

[Szymanski]

29 minutes ago, smeghammer said:

 

I have to live in the same country as this dickhead.

 

Government seems to be placing 'getting back to normal' over expert epidemiology advice. And, oh look - the spread is accelerating again (the infamous  'r' value). Just to be clear - WE DON'T HAVE A CURE YET.

There will never be a cure, there may be a vaccine but even those don't provide blanket immunity. Also please note that each 'case' doesn't mean someone is infected, ill or hospitalised, they simply have cells present that indicate a corona virus was present*1. However the accuracy of the test is in question.

 

If you look at the death rate at https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ you'll see that the death rate for the uk has been stable for months and the peak in deaths occurs after lockdown*2, at this point known ill patients were returned to nursing homes causing a surge in deaths. I believe the average age of death for corona virus is ~80 and coincides with the average for the uk. We can speculate that removing NHS services for cancer and heart disease patients also contributed to this peak in deaths. Also note that autopsies stopped and covid was put on the death certificate as the cause of death for patients who hadn't been tested.

 

Currently more people are dying of flu 

 

Why would government advisors with large investments in pharmaceuticals want the country locked down until a vaccine was ready?

 

If you think 2020 was bad 2021 is going to be a shock

 

 

*1 if you swabbed your skin you'd find loads of nasties, some potentially lethal like staphylococcus. A healthy immune system can cope. Try eating raw chicken, far more deadly than covid.

*2 despite evidence the virus has been around since late 2019

[Murdoch]

33 minutes ago, Szymanski said:

Currently more people are dying of flu 

 

Not true.

 

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

 

"24,000 – 62,000 deaths"

 

Current Covid deaths stand at 218K in America.

 

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsduetocoronaviruscovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumoniaenglandandwales/deathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020

 

Your claim also does not match the facts in the UK either.

 

Given the uniqueness of the situation, yes it is entirely possible the death numbers are inaccurate. However, the argument goes both ways. It is just as possible and indeed likely that deaths actually due to Covid have not been counted. Even still, this inaccuracy is very, very unlikely to have resulted in such a massive discrepancy in numbers. 

 

Here in New Zealand, due to the lockdown strategy flu cases have dropped dramatically.

 

Focusing on the death numbers makes you lose sight of the fact that many of the "recovered" have been left with after effects, some extremely debilitating. The death stats alone do not tell the full story of the destruction. Many of the dead are quite young and many of the survivors left with after effects are as well.

 

My own hypothesis (and by this I mean "blind guess from someone with zero education in any of the relevant fields") is that the virus is acting almost like an accelerant to conditions the body is already pre-disposed to. So you might have an initially healthy young person who got it, recovered, but has ongoing issues with their lungs. Had they not gotten infected, they might have started having lung issues once they hit 65 or something. So yes, age is certainly a predisposition to being affected as it weakens the body, just like it is with the flu. But if you are young and you get it and you lost the genetic lottery at birth, you are potentially in for a very rough time.

[smeghammer]

Yes, vaccine is a more accurate term.

 

It is not available yet (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21645515.2020.1787068)

 

There is a lot of political self-interest, probably in all countries. The UK advisory body SAGE recently advised measures that UK government did not heed:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54528983

 

With regard to a vaccine - the positive is that human coronavirus already has vaccines for prior seasonal strains and it is these that form the basis for some current vaccine searching efforts. COVID-19 probably originated from a bat, and there is no natural immunity is in humans. 

 

The other issue of course is the so-called 'herd immunity' - the percentage of people who have developed immunity who can act as a firewall to further spread - did not exist at the start. That will now be more of a mitigating factor.

 

I have to say it's been a while since I studied any epidemiology or virology (early '90s) so my brain is a bit rusty from that PoV. 

 

There will of course be many factors and different statistical ways of determining whether a person has/had COVID19, and other infections - particularly some bacterial (like your raw chicken example) - are more likely (per confirmed infection) to kill you.

 

IIRC, the current way of determining whether someone is infected is primarily symptomatic, with a genetic test to confirm. The genetic test will obviously also show positive for any asymptomatic carriers. It is a serological test that is missing.

 

Either way, COVID19 has crossed the species barrier to humans, and is here to stay. A vaccine is probably a year away (clinical trials take a long time) and, as you say, not everyone who receives a vaccine will automatically become immune (this is of course also true for any other vaccine). In the fullness of time it will stabilise as humans develop herd immunity.

 

This overview from World Health Organization is actually a really interesting read.

 

[smeghammer]

23 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

My own hypothesis (and by this I mean "blind guess from someone with zero education in any of the relevant fields") is that the virus is acting almost like an accelerant to conditions the body is already pre-disposed to. So you might have an initially healthy young person who got it, recovered, but has ongoing issues with their lungs. Had they not gotten infected, they might have started having lung issues once they hit 65 or something. So yes, age is certainly a predisposition to being affected as it weakens the body, just like it is with the flu. But if you are young and you get it and you lost the genetic lottery at birth, you are potentially in for a very rough time.

 

This is quite a good analogy actually. There are certainly reports of people who have had COVID19 who now have fucked up internal organs and circulatory systems.

 

Right, enough of this scary shit. I'm going to finish my chaingunner map.

[Szymanski]

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales/august2020

 

Covid has dropped to the 24th most common cause of death in England, I've seen quotations where the flu is higher. I don't follow the CDC because their figures are unreliable, they have a financial interest in the situation.

 

15 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

Focusing on the death numbers makes you lose sight of the fact that many of the "recovered" have been left with after effects, some extremely debilitating. The death stats alone do not tell the full story of the destruction. Many of the dead are quite young and many of the survivors left with after effects are as well.

1.4 million people died of tuberculosis in 2019, I know of three family members who've suffered from it. We can't solve this by hiding in our houses.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Personally I prefer ready salted.

[Murdoch]

12 minutes ago, Szymanski said:

1.4 million people died of tuberculosis in 2019, I know of three family members who've suffered from it. We can't solve this by hiding in our houses.

 

Also not true. A worldwide lockdown for long enough would cause it to die out. Infected people can't infect more people if their droplets don't touch them.

 

But such a lockdown does indeed carry downsides and is also practically impossible.

 

TB is a bacterial infection, not a virus, and has well known treatment options that often suceed. It is not a valid comparison.

Edited October 17, 2020 by Murdoch

[Redneckerz]

Great, another COVID-19 discussion where we try to outwit ourselves with our knowledge both pro and contra.

 

I honestly do not care about either of it. The only thing i care about is prevention and ensuring the place i work at (a hospital with known COVID victims) does not get more burden on the shoulders of those that try to take care for those affected.

 

Regarding Johnson's Full Friction Brexit: At this point in time i am also quite done with UK's stance on this whole ordeal.

• The agreement had to be postponed multiple times, causing additional delay
• After multiple postponements finally some kind of agreement surfaced, avoiding a full friction brexit. It did require an additional agreement to be finished within the year, though.
• 6 months in, Johnson announces he wants to get rid of that hard-fought agreement, because it was not fair if i recall correctly
• The law supporting cancellation of said agreement went through all Houses and was accepted.
• UK now accuses the EU of being non-flexible whilst the EU is rather done with this whole ordeal in general.

UK imo has nothing to complain over: They ditched the original agreement and now are bitching at the EU for being non-flexible, when they were the folks ditching the original, hard-fought agreement to begin with!

So no. They want their worst cake scenario, so they may eat it, too.

[smeghammer]

There are many really fucking nasty infections. Malaria is one of the biggest killers (WHO again), but it has been around forever, and is not really a Western problem, so isn't really thought about.

 

From a pure science PoV, the correlation between malaria prevalence and sickle cell anaemia is really interesting. Basically a nasty condition (SCA) helps to prevent the Babesia parasite spreading.

[Doomkid]

The quicker you go into at least some form of lockdown, the quicker you can come back out of lockdown. Pretending it doesn’t exist and carrying on as usual leads to a bunch of pointless death and doesn’t even keep the economy afloat realistically, so I don’t see why not. It’s been demonstrated to be an effective approach multiple times in multiple countries since the epidemic began, surprised its even being debated still.

[smeghammer]

12 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

• The agreement had to be postponed multiple times, causing additional delay
• After multiple postponements finally some kind of agreement surfaced, avoiding a full friction brexit. It did require an additional agreement to be finished within the year, though.
• 6 months in, Johnson announces he wants to get rid of that hard-fought agreement, because it was not fair if i recall correctly
• The law supporting cancellation of said agreement went through all Houses and was accepted.
• UK now accuses the EU of being non-flexible whilst the EU is rather done with this whole ordeal in general.

 

Yes, and those of us who live here and didn't vote for withdrawl from EU (it was a pretty exact 50/50 split if you recall) have to live with these shitty political posturing idiots.

[holaareola]

And now the UK's credit rating has been downgraded. Right at the time that we, like pretty much every government on earth, are borrowing money like it's going out of print.

 

I'm planning to leave the UK next year. Don't like the direction of travel. We've got a small-c corrupt government that is bamboozling a sizeable chunk of the populace on one side and an ineffectual opposition the most visible part of which's main occupation appears to be copy-pasting the least useful lines of discourse from the most fucked-up country in the developed world.

 

10 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

The quicker you go into at least some form of lockdown, the quicker you can come back out of lockdown. Pretending it doesn’t exist and carrying on as usual leads to a bunch of pointless death and doesn’t even keep the economy afloat realistically, so I don’t see why not. It’s been demonstrated to be an effective approach multiple times in multiple countries since the epidemic began, surprised its even being debated still.

I agree with "some form of" even though you emerge from lockdown to go back into lockdown, as we are seeing everywhere at the moment.  There are no clearly good options, but while a vaccine is on the horizon I personally think this is the right thing to do.

 

That said, I think the economic damage of prolonged lockdowns will be serious (a lot of it is currently still masked by furlough schemes) and will fall on the young most of all, a generation that has already been screwed by the financial crisis, exorbitant university fees, ballooning property prices and cost of living increases. Unemployment brings with it a huge number of associated negative conditions, and it's those jobs in retail, pubs, clubs and restaurants that have typically been done by young people and the working classes that are first to go.

 

https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/home/cost-living-uk-vs-wages (and this is only to 2014!)

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/how-have-prices-changed-over-time

 

If a vaccine doesn't work out due to mutations or insufficiently long immunity, I don't think we can carry on like this.

[FractalBeast]

This shit got me seriously worried, we'll see civil war or at least bombing campaigns over North-Ireland again.

 

Fucking Boris got his head up his arse so far, he doesn't even see the implications of what the fuck he's doing.

[insertwackynamehere]

1 hour ago, Murdoch said:

 

Also not true. A worldwide lockdown for long enough would cause it to die out. Infected people can't infect more people if their droplets don't touch them.

 

But such a lockdown does indeed carry downsides and is also practically impossible.

 

TB is a bacterial infection, not a virus, and has well known treatment options that often suceed. It is not a valid comparison.

I read that this is not necessarily true; diseases with “animal reservoirs” can not be wiped out even if everyone stayed inside for 2 months with 100% full compliance. I’m not sure if there is currently a fear that COVID has animal reservoirs or not but it came from animals and has been show to jump back to animals.

 

Regardless, it’s not worthwhile imagining such perfect scenarios as they amount to “solving” STDs by promoting abstinence only education rather than finding a realistic approach to minimize the effects and transmission of STDs in a world that isn’t going to stop having sex.

[insertwackynamehere]

2 hours ago, smeghammer said:

With regard to a vaccine - the positive is that human coronavirus already has vaccines for prior seasonal strains and it is these that form the basis for some current vaccine searching efforts. COVID-19 probably originated from a bat, and there is no natural immunity is in humans. 

Sorry for double posting but I can’t figure out how to edit another quote into my post on mobile.

 

I thought at the beginning of this I read there was never a coronavirus vaccine successfully developed. A quick search seems to confirm this.

 

One positive note about the corona virus vaccine is if it comes soon enough, I’m less concerned about ramp up and efficacy. If the first round of vaccines is just for the elderly and vulnerable, we will still be in a good position. A vaccine with 50% efficacy brings you that much closer to herd immunity without the deaths to get there, so it’s not as simple as saying “oh it sucks it only works half the time”. It makes everyone’s individual dice roll that much better, and it lessens the chances of rolling the dice in the first place. If only the sick and elderly get the vaccine first, there could still be a return to normalcy during that phase of the vaccine rollout because you suddenly minimize the death toll in the most vulnerable population and a lot of the “good citizen” reasons to not continue with life when younger and healthier go away.

Edited October 17, 2020 by insertwackynamehere

[smeghammer]

10 minutes ago, insertwackynamehere said:

Sorry for double posting but I can’t figure out how to edit another quote into my post on mobile.

 

I thought at the beginning of this I read there was never a coronavirus vaccine successfully developed. A quick search seems to confirm this.

 

Specifically not for COVID-19, true.

 

Other coronaviruses have had vaccines developed for them - see e.g.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7371592/ for an overview (specifically, Table 1) and https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-07/wrai-mvi072319.php for an example.

 

The first seems to be quite a good summary of different vaccine-development strategies too.

[insertwackynamehere]

I was only looking at popular science articles not papers but they seemed so say the same thing, development on MERS and SARS vaccines gave us a head start but the development of these vaccines never fully panned out (although perhaps due to lack of funding rather than dead ends, just speculating).

[smeghammer]

Hah, yes. Regardless, the r&d into SARS/MERS vaccines - even if never finished - has certainly given the current search for COVID19 vaccines a head-start. If you look past the scary-shit part of this, the science is fascinating.

[j4rio]

2 hours ago, Szymanski said:

1.4 million people died of tuberculosis in 2019, I know of three family members who've suffered from it. We can't solve this by hiding in our houses.

 

Are you comparing a curable and preventable disease with two thirds of all detected cases happening in just 8 countries with what is going on now? A disease that has steadily dropping yearly infection rates, because we are actually able to manage its spread? A disease with fatalities surging mainly in developing countries? If people are so eager to point out covid deaths are related to comorbidities, why don't you point out that 200k of those were immunocompromised HIV patients? Can you all please stop these hopelessly shitty arguments where you downplay covid mortality and hype the fuck out of some disease that we can treat and prevent?

 

Another thing that's seriously downplayed. Just because you see a "recovered" case does not mean that person is now healthy and fully back to normal. You can "recover" from getting run over by a train while having all your limbs amputated. You can also recover from covid, but end up severely impaired and having to rely on asthma medication, maybe even for the rest of your horribly quality-adjusted life, while ensuring profit for the evil pharma. If you think you can solve something by going out of your house, at this point it's quite limited to applying to vaccine clinical trials, but other than that, nothing you'd do outside of your house is going to help anybody in any way, other than yourself to cope with fear.

[smeghammer]

28 minutes ago, insertwackynamehere said:

A vaccine with 50% efficacy brings you that much closer to herd immunity without the deaths to get there, so it’s not as simple as saying “oh it sucks it only works half the time”. It makes everyone’s individual dice roll that much better

 

Wholeheartedly second this. Bitching about vaccines with < 100% efficacy is meaningless and misses one of the major points of  a vaccine.

[Doomkid]

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

That said, I think the economic damage of prolonged lockdowns will be serious (a lot of it is currently still masked by furlough schemes) and will fall on the young most of all, a generation that has already been screwed by the financial crisis, exorbitant university fees, ballooning property prices and cost of living increases. Unemployment brings with it a huge number of associated negative conditions, and it's those jobs in retail, pubs, clubs and restaurants that have typically been done by young people and the working classes that are first to go.

 

If a vaccine doesn't work out due to mutations or insufficiently long immunity, I don't think we can carry on like this.

Well, the idea behind a properly executed lockdown is that it only has to happen for a few weeks at a time before things can reopen and get semi normal, at least for a while until when/if another outbreak occurs in that area. Putting that aside though, I agree largely that we simply can't carry on as we are now. I think this virus has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting some of the serious flaws with how we currently function and how unsustainable they actually are. Even aside from the virus, younger generations have repeatedly seen increases in cost of living without seeing proportional increases in average "unskilled" labor wages and the disparity becomes even worse when you adjust for inflation, not to mention an ever shrinking window of opportunity when it comes to university education.

 

This whole pandemic has exasperated these issues in a big way, we're seeing the gutting of many essential workers (which, imo, most all of the ones you listed are essential) but really it's only the working class who are taking the hit - it's been a massive financial boon for some industries, particularly tech industries (and their CEOs who are essentially unmatched in terms of wealth, power and influence at this point) and ideally the fact that certain facets of the economy are actually benefiting from the outbreak would mean a focus on newer burgeoning fields - something that could result in many more jobs in industries where there was previously not much in the way of positions to fill.

 

This focus would of course have to be balanced by a focus on collective bargaining rights for employees to prevent us from falling into another prolonged economic downfall for the majority of the working class. When the common people have a decent money to spend and they don't have to worry about their rights being violated to get that decent amount of money, the economy gets strong as hell. Spending goes up, production goes up, from an economic standpoint solely it's all around a great thing that benefits everyone. If the country wasn't so politically fractured, everyone could possibly see this as a route to positive long-term change, even despite the current shitty spot we find ourselves in. I blame it on this weird shift towards the very concept of solidarity being seen as treasonous. "If my side says X I literally HAVE to think Y, and I won't budge even a single inch, even if all the facts suggest I'm in the wrong, because I can just skew the facts to fit whatever narrative it is I want to believe" seems more like the modern guiding principle.

 

Anyway, the tl;dr of it all is that I see many ways in which it's an ideal incentive for a sort of 'soft' economic and industrial revolution. Our current economic approach is clearly unsustainable on the whole and this is just bringing that fact to the surface in a very unfortunate way.. With how high political tensions are right now in the US though, I just can't imagine it happening. Really, it's hard to imagine cooperation working towards forward thinking solutions in the current era, as disheartening as it is to say and think. No one wants to argue in facts, and most talking heads are currently making their bread fear mongering about the implications of change - even though the implications of stagnation and downfall seem far more dire. One thing is certain, or at least seems like it shouldn't be too contentious to say - there are no easy solutions.

 

EDIT: Jesus, reading j4rio's post also made me consider how desperately healthcare reform is needed. I mean, one of the first world countries struggling the most with COVID also happens to be one of the only ones where healthcare is a "welp, hope you can afford it because if not fuck you" situation. It's like a cruel joke!

[insertwackynamehere]

12 minutes ago, j4rio said:

If you think you can solve something by going out of your house, at this point it's quite limited to applying to vaccine clinical trials, but other than that, nothing you'd do outside of your house is going to help anybody in any way, other than yourself to cope with fear.

Is there anywhere in the world currently advocating for March and April levels of “literally stay home, no exceptions”? The glib idea that months/years can be spent not leaving your home isn’t productive, realistic, or even ethically higher-minded.

[cannonball]

4 hours ago, Szymanski said:

There will never be a cure, there may be a vaccine but even those don't provide blanket immunity. Also please note that each 'case' doesn't mean someone is infected, ill or hospitalised, they simply have cells present that indicate a corona virus was present*1. However the accuracy of the test is in question.

 

If you look at the death rate at https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ you'll see that the death rate for the uk has been stable for months and the peak in deaths occurs after lockdown*2, at this point known ill patients were returned to nursing homes causing a surge in deaths. I believe the average age of death for corona virus is ~80 and coincides with the average for the uk. We can speculate that removing NHS services for cancer and heart disease patients also contributed to this peak in deaths. Also note that autopsies stopped and covid was put on the death certificate as the cause of death for patients who hadn't been tested.

 

Currently more people are dying of flu 

 

Why would government advisors with large investments in pharmaceuticals want the country locked down until a vaccine was ready?

 

If you think 2020 was bad 2021 is going to be a shock

 

 

*1 if you swabbed your skin you'd find loads of nasties, some potentially lethal like staphylococcus. A healthy immune system can cope. Try eating raw chicken, far more deadly than covid.

*2 despite evidence the virus has been around since late 2019

 

As this thread started because of some parody story about the UK, just from looking at the ONS (Office of national statistics)

Flu deaths this year up to the end of August - 394

Covid19 - 48168

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsduetocoronaviruscovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumoniaenglandandwales/deathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020

 

Just because our useless media spent several months reporting stories that for some reason clumped Flu and Pneumonia (It kills all year round as it can be caused by multiple factors) together. Does not mean it is true and the actual statistics back this up. Flu was already running at below average levels before Covid19 really took off in the UK, not to mention that influenza is already well on the decline by early Spring and stays at very low levels before the Autumn.

Edited October 17, 2020 by cannonball

[j4rio]

1 minute ago, insertwackynamehere said:

Is there anywhere in the world currently advocating for March and April levels of “literally stay home, no exceptions”? The glib idea that months/years can be spent not leaving your home isn’t productive, realistic, or even ethically higher-minded.

 

It literally doesn't matter. You can either go for draconian lockdowns or anarchistic free-for-alls. Pick your poison.

[insertwackynamehere]

2 minutes ago, j4rio said:

 

It literally doesn't matter. You can either go for draconian lockdowns or anarchistic free-for-alls. Pick your poison.

This is my point exactly. You don’t have to go with either of those.