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

[CFC]

In a case of the encroaching stupidity of imbeciles attempting to enforce rules without grasping the underlying point, we have stuff like this in the UK now:

Coronavirus: Easter egg crackdown over essential status 'wrong'

Convenience stores selling Easter eggs are facing interference from “heavy-handed” officials trying to restrict the range of goods they can sell under coronavirus curbs, a trade body says.

Some shops have been told by police and local councils that the chocolate eggs are considered non-essential goods.
The attempt to restrict the kinds of goods sold in convenience stores drew a scathing reaction from retail analyst Richard Hyman.

"Quite frankly, it sounds bonkers," he said. "This is a time when being excessively pedantic seems rather absurd.

"It's certainly right that if restrictions are going to be applied, they should be applied to types of outlet, not types of product."

He said the current rules, which put no restrictions on the items essential retailers can sell, were common sense and pointed out that supermarkets also had Easter eggs for sale.

"Going beyond that, what difference does it make if they do sell some Easter eggs? I suppose they might argue that it's taking up space on shelves that could be used for other items," Mr Hyman said.

Some social media users shared the same opinion, with one saying that chocolate was "the only thing keeping me sane" during the pandemic.

Coronavirus: Easter egg crackdown over essential status 'wrong'

Officials trying to stop convenience stores selling Easter eggs are told they have misread the rules.

www.bbc.co.uk

And then in a case of how blowing the over-hyped pandemic out of any kind of sensible proportion is having unintended consequences, we have yet more tragically unnecessary suicides:

German state finance minister Thomas Schäfer found dead

Police suspect Thomas Schäfer died by suicide after his body was found on train tracks near Wiesbaden. He was the finance minister for the state of Hesse, where Germany's financial center Frankfurt lies.

Schäfer had been living under considerable worry and stress because of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

"His main concern was whether he could manage to fulfill the huge expectations of the population, especially in terms of financial aid," Bouffier said on Sunday. "He clearly couldn't see any way out. He was desperate, and so he left us. That has shocked us, has shocked me."

German state finance minister found dead – DW – 03/29/2020

Police suspect Thomas Schäfer died by suicide after his body was found on train tracks near Wiesbaden. He was the finance minister for the state of Hesse, where Germany's financial center Frankfurt lies.

www.dw.com

 

[Painful One]

Sorry I am a bit behind the times.
seem to be moving in slow motion or something.
One day just falls into the next. I don’t even know what day of the week we are on a lot of the time.

We have 3 deaths from the Virus now in Utah.
The grocery store now has certain hours for at risk people and they are telling us to get enough groceries for two weeks.
then we have to come home and disinfect and wash our groceries.
we can now get a ticket for not proper social distancing or being in a group of two or more.

man, shit is getting weird!!!

 

[CoastTwoCoast]

Whoa! They’re giving out tickets now for not social distancing? That does sound kinda extreme, but at the same time, I get it. It’s actually for people’s own good.

 

[Xorkoth]

The media is overhyping it into fear porn, but it is serious. It's hard to know where the appropriate line is in terms of enforcement of rules by governments. I wish everything wasn't so extreme these days. People killing themselves over this is really sad.

 

[TheLoveBandit]

we have stuff like this in the UK now: [Easter eggs]

Nuts. All stores here are still selling all products. That attempted legislation makes absolutely no sense. I can't see anyone (seriously) arguing that chocolate is an 'essential' food, but restricting WHAT is sold does nothing that I can see in terms of curbing the spread. None at all, if people are transacting commerce on one product, they are just as likely to transmit with another product. Unless the reach attempt by gov't is to not have the chocolate industry working as supplies wind down. Absurdity.

more tragically unnecessary suicides:

Incredible pressure building, especially those in positions of authority/responsibility. Probably won't be the last, unfortunately.

One day just falls into the next. I don’t even know what day of the week we are on a lot of the time.

Aye. I haven't been able to track days for over a week now. It all blends together. I only know it's not a weekend because my boss keeps calling asking if I'm doing the 'work from home' stuff. I don't answer.

The grocery store now has certain hours for at risk people and they are telling us to get enough groceries for two weeks.

Same here. Elderly get the first hour (7-8am), then general public. Constant loudspeaker about any shortages will be addressed soon by our supply chain ramping up. That, alternating with 'Social distancing is a term we are hearing a lot these days. Please do your share by maintaining 6ft between shoppers'. It's like something out of a surreal future show. Then there is the now roped off check out lanes, all fed by ONE lane with tape marking safe distances between shoppers while you wait to pay.

 

[jpgrdnr]

 

[novaveritas]

pols offing themselves is perhaps a clear public good.
maybe they will learn to listen next time. It's not like they weren't told.

bored with stupid.

 

[Fire&Water]

polls offing themselves is perhaps a clear public good.
maybe they will learn to listen next time. It's not like they weren't told.

bored with stupid.

 

[JGrimez]

Looks like good 'ol Nazism is back packaged up in a different wrapper!

Watch at how they're going to come out with even more ludicrous/ridiculous policies to enforce upon us, and watch how willingly people accept it (and like the good authoritarian followers that they are - enforce them onto their fellow folk).

German state finance minister Thomas Schäfer found dead

I'm going to call suspicious on any politically-related suicides at this point (and in general). There is vastly powerful agenda at play here and people will fall if they attempt to get in the way of it. Corona-related panic suicide is a perfect excuse.

 

[JessFR]

)
I'm going to call suspicious on any politically-related suicides at this point (and in general).

Don't you do that anyway?

 

[CoastTwoCoast]

I didn’t even know about a German state finance minister found dead, but I was clearing out my tabs and that popped up on its own out of nowhere and it was a dead link. Weird. I hurried up and clicked that shit off my screen.

 

[OXYPA]

I knew about the food shortages and these are nothing compared to what's to come. You all either grow your own food now or you starve. Could be 1-2 years of pushing it out but it could happen sooner. This overhyped virus has accelerated a lot of their plans. Governments don't give a fuck about us, if they did we'd all be aware and preparing instead of sitting around clueless petrified of a virus that's killing less people than the flu.

So yeah don't be someone starving in a year or two asking how you could've planned for it.

Ever think about that boat that is supposed to be only for non-covid patients? Dont you it should carry the infected ones? Unless this is population control and they know that everyone is gonna get infected. No one is safe. That boat is for the rich who need to get away after the virus hit everyone in the world

 

[mr peabody]

Not wearing masks to protect against coronavirus 'a big mistake,’ top Chinese scientist says

by Jon Cohen | 27 Mar 2020

Chinese scientists at the front of that country’s outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have not been particularly accessible to foreign media. Many have been overwhelmed trying to understand their epidemic and combat it, and responding to media requests, especially from journalists outside of China, has not been a top priority.

Science has tried to interview George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for 2 months. Last week he responded.

Gao oversees 2000 employees—one-fifth the staff size of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and he remains an active researcher himself. In January, he was part of a team that did the first isolation and sequencing of severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. He co-authored two widely read papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that provided some of the first detailed epidemiology and clinical features of the disease, and has published three more papers on COVID-19 in The Lancet.

His team also provided important data to a joint commission between Chinese researchers and a team of international scientists, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), that wrote a landmark report after touring the country to understand the response to the epidemic.

First trained as a veterinarian, Gao later earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Oxford and did postdocs there and at Harvard University, specializing in immunology and virology. His research specializes in viruses that have fragile lipid membranes called envelopes—a group that includes SARS-CoV-2—and how they enter cells and also move between species.

Gao answered Science’s questions over several days via text, voicemails, and phone conversations.

George Gao

Q: What can other countries learn from the way China has approached COVID-19?

A: Social distancing is the essential strategy for the control of any infectious diseases, especially if they are respiratory infections. First, we used “nonpharmaceutical strategies,” because you don’t have any specific inhibitors or drugs and you don’t have any vaccines. Second, you have to make sure you isolate any cases. Third, close contacts should be in quarantine: We spend a lot of time trying to find all these close contacts, and to make sure they are quarantined and isolated. Fourth, suspend public gatherings. Fifth, restrict movement, which is why you have a lockdown, the cordon sanitaire in French.

Q: The lockdown in China began on 23 January in Wuhan and was expanded to neighboring cities in Hubei province. Other provinces in China had less restrictive shutdowns. How was all of this coordinated, and how important were the “supervisors” overseeing the efforts in neighborhoods?

A: You have to have understanding and consensus. For that you need very strong leadership, at the local and national level. You need a supervisor and coordinator working with the public very closely. Supervisors need to know who the close contacts are, who the suspected cases are. The supervisors in the community must be very alert. They are key.

Q: What mistakes are other countries making?

A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.

Q: What about other control measures? China has made aggressive use of thermometers at the entrances to stores, buildings, and public transportation stations, for instance.

A: Yes. Anywhere you go inside in China, there are thermometers. You have to try to take people’s temperatures as often as you can to make sure that whoever has a high fever stays out.

And a really important outstanding question is how stable this virus is in the environment. Because it’s an enveloped virus, people think it’s fragile and particularly sensitive to surface temperature or humidity. But from both U.S. results and Chinese studies, it looks like it’s very resistant to destruction on some surfaces. It may be able to survive in many environments. We need to have science-based answers here.

Q: People who tested positive in Wuhan but only had mild disease were sent into isolation in large facilities and were not allowed to have visits from family. Is this something other countries should consider?

A: Infected people must be isolated. That should happen everywhere. You can only control COVID-19 if you can remove the source of the infection. This is why we built module hospitals and transformed stadiums into hospitals.

Q: There are many questions about the origin of the outbreak in China. Chinese researchers have reported that the earliest case dates back to 1 December 2019. What do you think of the report in the South China Morning Post that says data from the Chinese government show there were cases in November 2019, with the first one on 17 November?

A: There is no solid evidence to say we already had clusters in November. We are trying to better understand the origin.

In Wuhan, people with mild COVID-19 cases were taken to large facilities and not permitted to see their families. “Infected people must be isolated. That should happen everywhere,” George Gao says.

Q: Wuhan health officials linked a large cluster of cases to the Huanan seafood market and closed it on 1 January. The assumption was that a virus had jumped to humans from an animal sold and possibly butchered at the market. But in your paper in NEJM, which included a retrospective look for cases, you reported that four of the five earliest infected people had no links to the seafood market. Do you think the seafood market was a likely place of origin, or is it a distraction—an amplifying factor but not the original source?

A: That’s a very good question. You are working like a detective. From the very beginning, everybody thought the origin was the market. Now, I think the market could be the initial place, or it could be a place where the virus was amplified. So that’s a scientific question. There are two possibilities.

Q: China was also criticized for not sharing the viral sequence immediately. The story about a new coronavirus came out in The Wall Street Journal on 8 January; it didn’t come from Chinese government scientists. Why not?

A: That was a very good guess from The Wall Street Journal. WHO was informed about the sequence, and I think the time between the article appearing and the official sharing of the sequence was maybe a few hours. I don’t think it’s more than a day.

Q: But a public database of viral sequences later showed that the first one was submitted by Chinese researchers on 5 January. So there were at least 3 days that you must have known that there was a new coronavirus. It’s not going to change the course of the epidemic now, but to be honest, something happened about reporting the sequence publicly.

A: I don’t think so. We shared the information with scientific colleagues promptly, but this involved public health and we had to wait for policymakers to announce it publicly. You don’t want the public to panic, right? And no one in any country could have predicted that the virus would cause a pandemic. This is the first noninfluenza pandemic ever.

Q: It wasn’t until 20 January that Chinese scientists officially said there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. Why do you think epidemiologists in China had so much difficulty seeing that it was occurring?

A: Detailed epidemiological data were not available yet. And we were facing a very crazy and concealed virus from the very beginning. The same is true in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and the United States: From the very beginning scientists, everybody thought: “Well, it’s just a virus.”

Q: Spread in China has dwindled to a crawl, and the new confirmed cases are mainly people entering the country, correct?

A: Yes. At the moment, we don’t have any local transmission, but the problem for China now is the imported cases. So many infected travelers are coming into China.

Q: But what will happen when China returns to normal? Do you think enough people have become infected so that herd immunity will keep the virus at bay?

A: We definitely don’t have herd immunity yet. But we are waiting for more definitive results from antibody tests that can tell us how many people really have been infected.

Q: So what is the strategy now? Buying time to find effective medicines?

A: Yes—our scientists are working on both vaccines and drugs.

Q: Many scientists consider Remdesivir to be the most promising drug now being tested. When do you think clinical trials in China of the drug will have data?

A: In April.

Q: Have Chinese scientists developed animal models that you think are robust enough to study pathogenesis and test drugs and vaccines?

A: At the moment, we are using both monkeys and transgenic mice that have ACE2, the human receptor for the virus. The mouse model is widely used in China for drug and vaccine assessment, and I think there are at least a couple papers coming out about the monkey models soon. I can tell you that our monkey model works.

Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org

 

[novaveritas]

corona virus reasearch is dangerous... be careful out there people

Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device

Australian Dr Daniel Reardon ended up in hospital after inserting magnets in his nostrils while building a necklace that warns you when you touch your face

www.theguardian.com

Cutting edge Australian research???

 

[JessFR]

If we had unlimited face masks, having everyone wear them would make sense.

Problem is we don't.

 

[atara]

corona virus reasearch is dangerous... be careful out there people

Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device

Australian Dr Daniel Reardon ended up in hospital after inserting magnets in his nostrils while building a necklace that warns you when you touch your face

www.theguardian.com

Cutting edge Australian research???

it's worth reading the link for this one guys

 

[JessFR]

Wow that's stupid.

The concept is sound, doing it with magnets not so much.

 

[CoastTwoCoast]

If we had unlimited face masks, having everyone wear them would make sense.

Problem is we don't.

That long article above was saying people with Coronavirus symptoms should wear a mask so they’re not spreading it and they should obviously. That’s fucking common sense.

I did hear a doctor say that wearing a mask is helpful only to train people to stop touching their face, NOT to prevent the virus from getting to them. You don’t have to wear a medical mask N95, just a regular mask for the purpose to stop touching your face. That’s the only way you can get it. By touching your eyes, nose or mouth.

There’s a shortage of medical masks for doctors who actually need them.

 

[JessFR]

That long article above was saying people with Coronavirus symptoms should wear mask so they’re not spreading it.

I did hear a doctor say that wearing a mask is helpful only to train people to stop touching their face, NOT to prevent the virus from getting to them. You don’t have to wear a medical mask N95, just a regular mask for the purpose to stop touching your face. That’s the only way you can get it. By touching your eyes, nose or mouth.

Does it? Sorry I skimmed over it the first time, and I can't be fucked going back and looking again right now so ill just take your word for it.

My bad.

Though, I'm not aware that anywhere is telling symptomatic people NOT to wear them.

 

[novaveritas]

If we had unlimited face masks, having everyone wear them would make sense.

Problem is we don't.

Most people don't know how to wear masks, and when it comes to respirators how to don them and remove them. How to put gloves on and off.....and that is just the medical profession. Joe and Joanna 6 pack not a hope.

People who know how to do this stuff talk to themselves when they are doing it, and have a buddy watch over them and shout at them before they screw up.

if when you are out and about you want to not touch your face with your hands duct tape cactuses to your hands. Or wear a strait jacket.