Anti-vaxers won't like this
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...cer-by-2035-amid-rising-hpv-vaccination-rates
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...cer-by-2035-amid-rising-hpv-vaccination-rates
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Feck 'em then!
A rule for life IMO
fantastic news, but it will never happen here because god and stuff.
Has anyone been keeping up with the news of Covid outbreak in China from a few weeks ago? I remember it was all gloom and doom with the Chinese government’s change in policy from zero covid to completely opening up the doors. Now the covid situation there doesn’t even find a mention in our news media.
It's more or less impossible to know.
They defined COVID deaths as only those directly caused by COVID pneumonia and that's not a common cause of death from the Omicron variant. They excluded anyone with a pre-existing condition, which basically excluded almost all the over 70s and most people at high risk of developing severe disease.
They also made it an advantage to local health officials to present good news figures only. In rural areas an official COVID death is almost impossible due to lack of testing and lack of acute hospital care (which is where COVID pneumonia would be diagnosed). Deaths at home etc don't count.
They've ended up officially declaring a peak death toll of around 4000/day and say its now below 1000/day. The real numbers are certainly a lot higher, but we may never know how much higher. We know from leaked video etc that some hospitals have been overwhelmed, that cemeteries and crematoriums have been running flat out.
We may get more data later, from regions who publish total deaths and do an excess deaths calculation - but I doubt we'll ever see the full story.
TLDR - nobody knows, not even The Chinese government.
I'm sure there's hundreds of viruses every year that could make the jump to us and cause a pandemic, but the scale of infections and it now infecting mammals makes this a bit scary to read 
The bird flu outbreak has taken an ominous turn | Ars Technica
The bird flu outbreak has taken an ominous turn | Ars Technica
I wouldn't be posting stuff like that here, regulars in this thread are determined to believe it came from a wet market and anything other than that is "misinformation" or "disinformation"
Well we really dont know where it originated, there are multiple theories from multiple agencies. In one way it mostly depends on what you want to believe that determines which theory you follow.
I don't think people are determined to believe anything other than it's a close relative of lots of other coronaviruses in human and animal circulation. It doesn't have obvious markers of being genetically engineered.
Could it have been a virus that the Wuhan lab were looking at? Sure - labs all over the world work with viruses, including animal viruses, to look at possible hazards and possible treatments. If their containment method failed then that could be the source.
There have always been question marks over when the Chinese authorities knew. Some of the intelligence services had already reported that the lab's normal communications pattern (how many cell phones in use etc) changed in late 2019.
Did someone working at the lab catch something at Wuhan market? Did someone get exposed to a live virus in the lab and spread it outside? Did someone from the lab sell virus exposed animals to the market? It may be the lab was where the initial animal/human crossover took place, or it may be the lab was asked to analyse cases before there were any official reports. We don't know and we're not convinced the Chinese government would tell us, that's why three years later it's still being analysed.
I think a lot of the original push back wasn’t against a lab leak but the conspiracy theories that it was man made in the lab
Correct. Conspiracy theorists watch too much Resident Evil to even have a sane discussion about the possibility that some random lab worker did a lousy job with pathogens.
What’s the theory? Create a virus to make a shit load of money?
No shit. Said it from day 1. Though I believe it’s an accident and not deliberate
Okay now I believe it came from a wet market
I don't. Not impossible but unlikely.
Managed to avoid it for 3 years, but the missus got it and passed it on to me!
Somehow went from feeling relatively good last night, to waking up at 5am extremely heavy headed, with a rapid heart rate. Took a couple of paracetamol and feel reasonable now.
Funny how I've got the exact same symptoms as I did after my 1st vaccine. Hoping it will last the same amount of time as that too!
Somehow went from feeling relatively good last night, to waking up at 5am extremely heavy headed, with a rapid heart rate. Took a couple of paracetamol and feel reasonable now.
Funny how I've got the exact same symptoms as I did after my 1st vaccine. Hoping it will last the same amount of time as that too!
It came from bloody Lindelof
Oh it’s wicked alrightI wouldn't be surprised with that wicked right boot of his
I may regret this but here’s fascinating thread on - oh yes - Sweden and the outcome of their approach in terms of excess deaths.
tl;dr Looks like a lot of the decisions they made have been vindicated by data/hindsight.
tl;dr Looks like a lot of the decisions they made have been vindicated by data/hindsight.
Although worth bearing in mind that Sweden did still implement a fair few measures to limit spread. And did a great job with vaccinations. All of which helps.
We probably do and I'd trust peer reviewed science over the FBI
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00584-8
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/covid-tied-to-wildlife-sales-at-wuhan-market
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
So my partner tested positive for COVID just under 2 weeks ago.
We sleep in the same bed and haven't been apart for months but I didn't get it from her.
Admittedly I've had a few boosters with last one being around October last year.
Was expecting to wake up every day with some symptoms but nope.
Obviously, I did a test and it came back negative.
Probably checked out my lungs after all the years smoking and said, "we're good, bro. Let's move on troops."
I still haven't had COVID so was surprised she didn't pass it to me.
We sleep in the same bed and haven't been apart for months but I didn't get it from her.
Admittedly I've had a few boosters with last one being around October last year.
Was expecting to wake up every day with some symptoms but nope.
Obviously, I did a test and it came back negative.
Probably checked out my lungs after all the years smoking and said, "we're good, bro. Let's move on troops."
I still haven't had COVID so was surprised she didn't pass it to me.
I'd also place money on that not being a valid comparison due to the different ways data is classified, collected and/or compared to previous years.
I got COVID and the rapid tests didn't detect it until I was well on the way to recovery and even then the line was very very faint. Probably due to the rapid testsnot being that great especially with omicron.
Is it possible I did have it but showed no symptoms?
Certainly possible I'd say.
Perhaps be better I don't tell her that otherwise I'll get the blame of passing it onto her. (She still wears a mask daily)
The thread goes deep on all of that. It’s as valid a comparison as it’s possible to make.
Regulas mourinho.gif incoming.
I know we argued a lot but I don't think the Sweden model would work here. As you say, we fecking love to socialise in Ireland.
I guess the argument to the other side would be, would we have socialised so damn much and hard all at once if there weren't big long shutdowns in our everyday lives compared to most of Europe? Unlikely.
Yep, I agree and it makes for some interesting reading. Interpretation isn't easy though - because it's very hard not to read our own personal prejudices into it.
Some patterns are pretty clear-cut. The European countries who got hit earliest in the first wave were always going to be in poor shape that year - we heard about but didn't experience SARS1/MERS - it wasn't until COVID hit Italy that I think most of us really understood what a pandemic looked like
The business/school/travel closures while we were trying to understand IFRs etc made sense, but equally it made sense to understand what people were doing for themselves. If you look at some of the details, it's pretty clear that infection rates must have been falling fast in some countries before any kind of official lockdown started - though hospitalisations and deaths were still rising due to the time lag between infection and severe illness.
What I think it does illustrate though is that while legal controls can sound like a solution, they are only about "flattening the curve" to keep hospitals running and to buy time while trying to understand the disease and look for solutions. The heavy lifting in terms of longterm death tolls is actually done by vaccines and health/social care. Ultimately that requires a level of social cohesion, trust and funding which is more important than any particular legal definition of essential services/travel/mixing etc.
But looking at the results as displayed I'd place money on it being misleading.
Yeah, we saw with our crazy surges later on in the pandemic what can happen when we take the brakes off. And that’s really just normal Irish socialising. I don’t actually think it’s possible to socialise more than we always did already. Post lockdown giddiness or not.
I still think it’s good that we tried to keep a lid on things when our ICUs were filling up fast. That intuitively felt like the right thing to do. Working from home and closing pubs and nightclubs in the earliest stage of the pandemic. With hindsight, maybe we kept them closed too long? Ditto for school closures. And the ban on amateur sports felt insane at the time and looks even more mad now.
Why though? The data is what it is. It feels like you don’t want to believe it because of your own biases. Which is unscientific.
Because the data isn't comparable.
If the baseline data differs and the current data differs then comparison graphs are meaningless