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Covid-19 Outbreak of new SARS-like coronavirus (Covid-19)

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www.cnn.com

Vice President Mike Pence, second lady Karen Pence test negative for coronavirus, White House says

Vice President Mike Pence and second lady Karen Pence have both tested negative for coronavirus, his spokeswoman announced Saturday evening.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

Yeah, no one is in control of this one. No god to even seek vengeance.

The universe is a chaotic, meaningless void.

I expect this is going to fizzle out in a few years, or not. It really doesn't matter because the world is never going to be what it used to be. I don't know why I even try to keep going on.
 
Reading the comments is rather revealing. Fact is it's an opinion piece. These are very early days. I agree there is too much hysteria, but the article misses the mark IMO.

An example of a comment:

I am a former science writer for The Washington Post and The New York Times, including 10 years covering biomedicine at The Post. Mr. Ginn, this piece you wrote is deeply, deeply irresponsible. You are ignorant of basic concepts of epidemiology. And R0 of 2.4, the figure around which multiple studies have converged, means that a virus will move explosively through the population absent mitigation, as indeed it was doing until very recently, and in some states is probably doing still. A case-fatality rate of 1%, if indeed it turns out to be that low, means that such a virus moving rapidly through the population will completely overwhelm the health-care system, at which point the case-fatality rate will rise quite sharply. In the two epicenters of infection in the United States, Washington state and New York City, this is on the verge of happening right now; at this very moment, tent hospitals are going up in soccer fields and armories. It has already happened in Italy, with the result that triage decisions are being made to allow older people to die on hospital gurneys with minimal or no treatment. Your piece completely ignores the fact that in the places where R0 fell, it was BECAUSE of draconian restrictions on movement (Hubei province)or a strategy of broad population screening and isolating everyone who is positive for the virus (South Korea). The United States is now trying a very weak, patchy version of the Hubei strategy, which is likely to be insufficient. It is completely incapable of mounting the South Korea strategy, largely because people of your ideological persuasion have spent decades gutting the public-health capacity of the country. Anyone who reads your piece and takes it seriously is likely to ignore the public-health guidance. This means that you, personally, are going to be responsible for illness and death, possibly among people you care about. Please take this ignorant and dangerous piece down now.
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Also a number of people pointed out that experience with viral marketing does not in any way correlate with actual viruses.
 
Ffs, nobody seems to have any perspective. It's either the end of the world, or it's all a big hoax.

It's not a hoax, and it's not the end of the world. In a couple years from now in all likelihood the world will be pretty much back to normal. Many people will be poorer, many people will be dead, but society as a whole will be much the same as it was before. Except likely the virus will have pushed people into further embracing telecommunications technology for stuff we used to do face to face. Which we should have already been doing.

What will happen, is the virus will get out of control, in many places it'll overwhelm the health system. There will be much suffering. But for the majority, sooner or later we will have a vaccine, the numbers of new infections and deaths will start to drop. And the social distancing laws will be relaxed, or in many instances expire on their own.

That's what will happen. Not nothing, but also not the collapse of civilization as we know it.
 
On the plus side of the pandemic I think law enforcement is going to tasked with so many other pressing matters that the last thing they’ll be doing is worrying about illicit drugs for a while. Drug cops will get retasked to really urgent stuff (like slowing down the looting and pillaging as our cities collapse)
 
Captain.Heroin said:
A few years is a long time to put your life on hold for.
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This is going to be a tough few years. There's no denying that. And it'll be a tougher on some than others.

But it's not the end of the world. It's not the end of society. It's generally not even the end of society as we know it.

Society will be changed for having gone through this, in some ways for the better. But life will continue much as it always has. Just as it did after the Spanish flu, world War 2, 9/11. The world was certainly changed yes, it's fair to say that it'll never be exactly like it was prior to those events, but by no means is it over.
 
Captain.Heroin said:
Some of those events profoundly negatively impacted our lives and civil liberties. The latter of which I am very concerned about.
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Understandable. But I'm not too worried. I don't think it's likely to stay this way in the long run.

Some people will call that naive I'm sure, but I see no reason to think that they won't be reversed. Especially since many of these laws have automatic expiration, or only function for as long as there's a declared health crisis.

Regardless, the only alternative is to not take these extreme measures. And that would cost thousands of lives.

So long as the infringement is short, and there are safeguards in place, up to a point anyway, I think it's tolerable.

I've seen no evidence of the crisis being used in the west to justify the outright suppression of free speech. Free protest in public yes, but not internet speech.

In short. Nothing I've seen in the west suggests to me that this is going anywhere beyond what's legitimately justified for health reasons. If it looks like it's becoming political suppression, that's when I'll worry.
 
The U.S. now has the third-largest number of cases.

mr peabody said:
Battle to contain the virus is lost, health officials say

by Carolyn Johnson and Lena Sun | Washington Post | 21 Mar 2020

Health officials in New York, California and other hard-hit parts of the country are restricting coronavirus testing to health care workers and people who are hospitalized, saying the battle to contain the virus is lost, and the country is moving into a new phase of the pandemic response.
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Well, I'm glad we just got a deal in place to close the border to most non-commercial travelers. With the integrated U.S.-Canada supply chains, though, I don't know how good that will do at keeping the New York epidemic from spreading to Ontario and Quebec.

TheLoveBandit said:
Don't let the headline scare you, this isn't about media hype it is actually a researcher trying to explain the numbers and real effects on populations in terms regular people can understand. It's long, but fairly straightforward and educational

Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19
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Whatever this story was, the publisher decided to pull it.
 
I think it's still a bit early to get too down...it still feels so recent, I didn't know what the hell a coronavirus was before 2020. There are so many stories of people in the past persevering through times much worse than this...I don't know. I still have hope for us, as someone else said, not only is it something I've never experienced before, it's not something my father has ever experienced before, or HIS father ever experienced! My grandfather wasn't around in 1919. So with something that "new", it's not unexpected that humans might get caught flat footed when it suddenly re-appears

I'm optimistic that when people get their bearings and organize a real counter-attack on this problem, we can wipe this out just like other public health scourges within a relatively short period of time. I definitely sympathize with folks who are having a hard time with this, though, whether they're taking a hit from losing money, being worried about loved ones, just being knocked off kilter by how fast things can turn to shit...I've felt the same way recently, this has really disrupted some plans I had. Currently I'm living in a very rural environment where there's NOTHING going on, LOL. No services and a dirt road that leads in and out. It's good for a disease outbreak-kinda situation but I've been feeling very lonely and isolated, and the news from the outside world just makes everything so much worse, it's just felt like there's been an avalanche of shit over these past couple weeks!
 
When do you predict we will be able to just walk in a store and actually buy toilet paper again? Will these stores start mass ordering the stuff. When will this TP hoarding behavior fizzle out? It's gotta stop somewhere. Is there a calculation that would shed light on this matter?
 
The US was always going to have a lot of cases by sheer numbers because of its large population.
I wish they'd use per capita numbers instead, it'd be giving a much clearer idea.

Not that it matters too much, the testing in the US is horribly lacking. And it's obvious that it's way higher in the US than the numbers say. Most new cases in Australia have been from people coming from or returning from the US. So it's gotta be way higher than anyone sees.
 
There's no reason to believe it will go back to the way it was.

There's just going to be more infringement of civil liberties overtime.

What if this never goes away? Why should a vaccine necessarily come to fruition one day?

Who knows how useful it will be if the virus keeps mutating?
 
CfZrx said:
When do you predict we will be able to just walk in a store and actually buy toilet paper again? Will these stores start mass ordering the stuff. When will this TP hoarding behavior fizzle out? It's gotta stop somewhere. Is there a calculation that would shed light on this matter?
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Depends on where you live.

In Australia, I'd say a few more weeks.
People will stop hoarding either when the supply chain catches up, or when new social isolation laws start preventing it. Whichever happens first. Either way, a few weeks would be my bet.
 
Captain.Heroin said:
There's no reason to believe it will go back to the way it was.

There's just going to be more infringement of civil liberties overtime.

What if this never goes away? Why should a vaccine necessarily come to fruition one day?

Who knows how useful it will be if the virus keeps mutating?
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This virus mutates at about half the rate of influenza. So a vaccine will almost certainly be quite effective.
There is already a faster rush to develop a vaccine than any other time in history. It's coming.

There is reason to believe it will go back to the way it was. And that reason is that if the goal were just infringing civil liberties, they could have done so much more to fight the virus.

If you don't care about civil liberties, we could have been like China by now. But obviously that's not the case, for better or worse.

That's why I believe it will be temporary. Cause if civil liberties were being targeted, there's no reason we should have fucked up the response so badly.
 
Captain.Heroin said:
Some of those events profoundly negatively impacted our lives and civil liberties. The latter of which I am very concerned about.
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die on your feet or live on your knees begging an all merciful government for some quarter.

People who actually are trying to fix this are getting increasingly frustrated with:

1- The idiotic apologists for hysterical govt reactions. Amongst the clamour for more draconian restrictions on liberty and further disruptions

2- the disruptions these hysterical reactions are causing to getting testing in place to find out what the hell is going on and getting things in place to fix this are serious.

3-The secrecy going on in certain trials (for example I know that several universities are running P1 trials of vaccines in secret the researchers told me) The only reason for secrecy is to exploit the information for monetary gain.

These are the dumb moves by government that I warned about earlier.

This is a call to everyone to work together openly across borders, across organisations between organisations, share resources, share information, It is also a call for anyone that has the access to anyone in positions of power and influence to encourage sensible moves based on real information.

If anyone has any sensible solutions, other than more of the same idiocy, that put them forwards, otherwise keep the frequency clear.

To all Americans, it is not a win for America by monopolising resources and using the mighty dollar to buy up things vital to diagnosing and treating the disease that the USA has no capacity to use to make an end product. All it does is screw up supply to those that can already make the finished products. The world is watching you America and it is not impressed.

To all Americans, release all sanctions on Iran, right now, not tomorrow or next week, if Iran is not helped it will at as a nucleus causing further un-neccesary deaths.

Jess I have no idea what your field is, but you are not an expert on immunology. Coronavirus vaccines are notoriously difficult and it is not due to viral mutations. The roll out of a partially tested vaccine that confers partial immunity or causes priming / antibody dependent enhancement in the real world is more dangerous than no vaccine at all. There is good reason to believe a vaccine is possible but by the time it is properly tested and available in sufficient quantities nCOV will be waning naturally.

I see the screaming hysterical virtue signallers have caused the article TLB linked to be taken down. Good job guys.
 
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The secrecy is just in case this was biologically engineered...

You would think that there wouldn't be secrecy if all points to zoonotic. Something must not be pointing that way don't you all get that much...

That and the fact that there are other governments on Earth who may have a different agenda than ours...

I think the paranoia exists for a reason even if it shouldn't.
 
Whoever comes up with a vaccine will be in an excellent position to make a lot of money. While I think nova's suggestions about social practices would result in hundreds of thousands dead, I tend to agree that there's an obvious capitalist motive to be the first with a working vaccine.
 
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