SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

11101

Full Member
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
21,206
Has there ever been a real trial?
What do you mean real? Countries have given selected groups of citizens UBI but it has not worked as planned. The last one even ended early it was going so badly.
 

Josep Dowling

Full Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2014
Messages
7,622
Which then ups the costs or production, which then ups the costs of the end price of product, which then makes consumer pay more for said product, so then basic income wont be sufficient anymore.

It's the same with upping minimum wage as it is now, it's just a big circle :lol:
At each layer of the cake people will want to earn more which just increases the price of everything. I don’t think you can create a UBI because of this. If someone received £1,500 a month from UBI you can pretty much guarantee rent prices will increase straight away. Or you will have situations where people don’t want to do certain minimum wage jobs. It sounds like a great idea but the capitalist model doesn’t allow for it. And before someone says ‘well get rid of capitalism’, I can’t see that happening anytime soon.
 

Wibble

In Gadus Speramus
Staff
Joined
Jun 15, 2000
Messages
88,602
Location
Centreback
What do you mean real? Countries have given selected groups of citizens UBI but it has not worked as planned. The last one even ended early it was going so badly.
All of the trials I have seen haven't been a UBI. Usually only given to welfare recipients so not a UBI at all.

Even so the results over the years have often shown promise with little or no disincentive to work, improved mental health and generally the money hasn't been used to buy drugs or other things people worry about. And people forget that it doesn't matter if some choose to live in poverty on just the UBI as that is the whole point (or at least one of them), as we don't and probably never will have full employment at the current 40+hrs a week. UBI would potentially save a huge amount on administering social and pension payments, allow people to try to start small businesses and the like without having to pointlessly job hunt, and many other benefits. The hard bit probably isn't having a UBI, it is how you transition to one imo. And with the kneejerk state of politics these days the first bump in the road and we would be back to punishing people for poverty and blaming those slightly less well off than ourselves for not being wealthy - again without blaming who is really at fault (who we keep on voting for inexplicably).
 

Prometheus

Full Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
2,708
Supports
Chelsea
The US throwing a tantrum now that a UN organisation isn't dancing for them.

This would be hilarious if the whole situation wasn't so tragic.
 

NYAS

Full Member
Joined
Dec 25, 2012
Messages
4,315
The US throwing a tantrum now that a UN organisation isn't dancing for them.

This would be hilarious if the whole situation wasn't so tragic.
Regardless of what you think of the US, it isn’t deniable that the WHO have been absolutely pathetic throughout the pandemic.
 

Dr. Dwayne

Self proclaimed tagline king.
Joined
May 9, 2006
Messages
97,255
Location
Nearer my Cas, to thee
The US throwing a tantrum now that a UN organisation isn't dancing for them.

This would be hilarious if the whole situation wasn't so tragic.
Meh, much like the UN I'll wager they don't pay their bills anyway. I don't even care if I'm wrong. Greatest country in the world my arse.
 

Arruda

Love is in the air, everywhere I look around
Joined
Apr 8, 2009
Messages
12,584
Location
Azores
Supports
Porto
Regardless of what you think of the US, it isn’t deniable that the WHO have been absolutely pathetic throughout the pandemic.
They were not nearly as bad as most countries in the world and were on top of this from the start, even though WHO is quite a bureaucratic organization run by lousy politicians. Still, they warned the world an emergency was coming, we ignored it, and there's no one to blame but us.

They do tremendous field work and some of their programs against AIDS, Tuberculosis and other diseases are basically everything the poorest countries in the world have got.

Plus they harmonize disease classifications all over the world. This may seem minor on the surface but is invaluable for medical sciences. Specially cancer research.

If they become underfunded only harm will come from it.
 

Giggs86

Full Member
Joined
Jul 16, 2014
Messages
3,632
Location
USA
The US throwing a tantrum now that a UN organisation isn't dancing for them.

This would be hilarious if the whole situation wasn't so tragic.
Great news. They are more corrupt than FIFA. Let their Chinese overlords pick up the tab until they do a massive overhaul and cut the political crap.
 

NYAS

Full Member
Joined
Dec 25, 2012
Messages
4,315
They were not nearly as bad as most countries in the world and were on top of this from the start, even though WHO is quite a bureaucratic organization run by lousy politicians. Still, they warned the world an emergency was coming, we ignored it, and there's no one to blame but us.

They do tremendous field work and some of their programs against AIDS, Tuberculosis and other diseases are basically everything the poorest countries in the world have got.

Plus they harmonize disease classifications all over the world. This may seem minor on the surface but is invaluable for medical sciences. Specially cancer research.

If they become underfunded only harm will come from it.
Their members and workers at the local and field level are lifesavers. The top is a very different story.
 

Prometheus

Full Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
2,708
Supports
Chelsea
They were not nearly as bad as most countries in the world and were on top of this from the start, even though WHO is quite a bureaucratic organization run by lousy politicians. Still, they warned the world an emergency was coming, we ignored it, and there's no one to blame but us.

They do tremendous field work and some of their programs against AIDS, Tuberculosis and other diseases are basically everything the poorest countries in the world have got.

Plus they harmonize disease classifications all over the world. This may seem minor on the surface but is invaluable for medical sciences. Specially cancer research.

If they become underfunded only harm will come from it.
Well said.
 

Foxbatt

New Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2013
Messages
14,297
I live in Toronto, in the province of Ontario. Canada's largest city (2.5 million) and most populous province (14.5 million). We are trying our best but have almost 500 new cases today and 43 new dead (Over 4k active cases and over 300 dead). Many of our dead are elderly folks who live in care homes and every day there are more stories of dozens of deaths being reported by these institutions. The whole country is loked down, some provinces perhaps more than others. In Ontario only essential business are allowed to be open but some critics say the list is pretty generous.
I am stuck in the maritimes. It's not so bad so far. No deaths in NB but very strick enforcement. I hope it remains the same but most people are not keeping the distance and very few wearing a mask.
A couple of grocery stores are not enforcing the distance. Only groceries and hardware and pharmacies gas stations are open.
Keep safe buddy.
 

barros

Correctly predicted Portugal to win Euro 2016
Joined
Mar 8, 2004
Messages
8,638
Location
Where liberty dwells, there is my country
They were not nearly as bad as most countries in the world and were on top of this from the start, even though WHO is quite a bureaucratic organization run by lousy politicians. Still, they warned the world an emergency was coming, we ignored it, and there's no one to blame but us.

They do tremendous field work and some of their programs against AIDS, Tuberculosis and other diseases are basically everything the poorest countries in the world have got.

Plus they harmonize disease classifications all over the world. This may seem minor on the surface but is invaluable for medical sciences. Specially cancer research.

If they become underfunded only harm will come from it.
This organization ignored a warning from Taiwan.... that Tedros needs to go, now we know why china voted for him.
 

Prometheus

Full Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
2,708
Supports
Chelsea
Great news. They are more corrupt than FIFA. Let their Chinese overlords pick up the tab until they do a massive overhaul and cut the political crap.
The UN has been acting like a mistress for the US for decades. I'd want them to cut the political crap as well, but in my opinion it's never going to happen. Much of the current blame, whoever, is manufactured. The blame people are levelling at WHO currently is based on Breitbart conspiracies that they helped China cover up stuff. What's true is that both WHO and China could have done better job in the first two weeks of January. But the UK and US had months to prepare for this, and now they are quite clearly trying to divert attention from their mistakes. I'm amazed the extent to which these countries are able to divert blame.
 

Foxbatt

New Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2013
Messages
14,297
They were not nearly as bad as most countries in the world and were on top of this from the start, even though WHO is quite a bureaucratic organization run by lousy politicians. Still, they warned the world an emergency was coming, we ignored it, and there's no one to blame but us.

They do tremendous field work and some of their programs against AIDS, Tuberculosis and other diseases are basically everything the poorest countries in the world have got.

Plus they harmonize disease classifications all over the world. This may seem minor on the surface but is invaluable for medical sciences. Specially cancer research.

If they become underfunded only harm will come from it.
The USA has a position in the Executive Board. Trump has not appointed anyone to the US Chair in WHO.
So whose fault is it?
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
The UN has been acting like a mistress for the US for decades. I'd want them to cut the political crap as well, but in my opinion it's never going to happen. Much of the current blame, whoever, is manufactured. The blame people are levelling at WHO currently is based on Breitbart conspiracies that they helped China cover up stuff. What's true is that both WHO and China could have done better job in the first two weeks of January. But the UK and US had months to prepare for this, and now they are quite clearly trying to divert attention from their mistakes. I'm amazed the extent to which these countries are able to divert blame.
They criticized the US for banning flights to China (how on Earth this comes from an organization that is supposed to be about the health).

Only three days before China locked Wuhan, WHO said that the virus is not transmitting human to human, which was laughable. Yeah, hundreds of people ate infected bats or something.

They didn't declare this a pandemic until the situation became manageable in China.

And then the disgraceful treatment for Taiwan, just check the interview with that Canadian vice-chair of WHO.

They are totally corrupted and the entire top hierarchy needs to be fired. They would find a good job in China anyway, so it is all fine for them.

------

Now, don't get me wrong, President Twat is doing this mostly to shift the blame for himself. And while he was right on banning the flights to China et al., he did feck all in between to prepare for the inevitable pandemic. So, in some level, I agree that the discussion is a bit academical, probably nothing would have changed if WHO acted faster and weren't essentially doing a PR job for China. But at the same time, it needs to be the World Health Organisation, not a propaganda machine for one of the superpowers. China is very good at hiding information, no need for the other countries to pay money to some organization that then does that for China.
 

Suedesi

Full Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2001
Messages
23,866
Location
New York City
A possibility that nobody seems to want to acknowledge is that we may NEVER develop a vaccine that is safe/effective enough to roll out globally. We still haven’t got a vaccine for any other type of coronavirus (e.g. SARS or MERS) that’s good enough to be used on the scale we need. And that’s despite several years of trying.
How hard did we try though? SARS and MERS were poorly transmissbale from human to human - they're mostly zoonotic - animal to human (civic cats/camels). So only those individuals who are in contact with the animals are at risk. My understanding is that the number of deaths and the economic consequences of both MERS / SARS were a rounding error.

This is different, everyone is feeling it right now becasue of the economic shutdown, stay at home orders and the fact that people had to adjust their entire life in light of something that has been extremely disruptive, not to mention those that have lost a family member. So I suspect, this will take a priority until we find a vaccine.
 
Last edited:

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
What do we think might be the true case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2?
Somewhere around 0.5% IMO (with good medical support). Iceland has tested 5%+ of their population, and currently, it is 0.46% there, with 8 cases in serious/critical condition (8 deaths so far, so if all those in serious conditions die, then the death rate increases to 0.9%). Diamond Princess with 100% testing has a death rate of 1.7% (which can still go higher, some people are still in bad conditions), but they had a very skewed distribution (it is a cruise ship after all, so old people were over-represented and young people under-representing).

I think it might be slightly lower than 0.5%, and I would be extremely surprised if it is over 1%.
 

Prometheus

Full Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
2,708
Supports
Chelsea
Somewhere around 0.5% IMO (with good medical support). Iceland has tested 5%+ of their population, and currently, it is 0.46% there, with 8 cases in serious/critical condition (8 deaths so far, so if all those in serious conditions die, then the death rate increases to 0.9%). Diamond Princess with 100% testing has a death rate of 1.7% (which can still go higher, some people are still in bad conditions), but they had a very skewed distribution (it is a cruise ship after all, so old people were over-represented and young people under-representing).

I think it might be slightly lower than 0.5%, and I would be extremely surprised if it is over 1%.
Have you seen the CFR for Germany now? I remember we had a discussion about this when their CFR was 0.6%. It's now 2.4%. South Korea is at 2.1%.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
With the common cold there are too many strains, 200 or more. They're always circulating and when you get one it doesn't really give you any immunity against it or any other strain. With Covid19 there are only a handful if that.

The flu has less strains to begin with, only 10 or 20 of them cause the majority of infections, and they don't all circulate at once.
Additionally, only 25% of common colds are caused by coronaviruses, and there are 4 different coronaviruses that cause them. So not only there are many strains, but there are 4 different viruses.

Plus, the common cold is not a big deal. Most of the people even go to work/school when they have it (unlike the flu, which typically puts people on the bed for a week or so). I don't think there is so much incentive for vaccines for the cold, and with so many viruses and strains, it is probably very hard to have an effective vaccine. Even the flu vaccine, actually protects people from what scientists believe to be the most common strain (for that season) for 3 different viruses.
 

Suedesi

Full Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2001
Messages
23,866
Location
New York City
Somewhere around 0.5% IMO (with good medical support). Iceland has tested 5%+ of their population, and currently, it is 0.46% there, with 8 cases in serious/critical condition (8 deaths so far, so if all those in serious conditions die, then the death rate increases to 0.9%). Diamond Princess with 100% testing has a death rate of 1.7% (which can still go higher, some people are still in bad conditions), but they had a very skewed distribution (it is a cruise ship after all, so old people were over-represented and young people under-representing).

I think it might be slightly lower than 0.5%, and I would be extremely surprised if it is over 1%.
Fair enough, that's what I'm seeing as well. Testing has been heterogenous across the US, but globally South Korea and Iceland used to do the most testing and now Germany also doing a lot and the figures I'm seeing vacillate between 0.37% and 0.66%. This is an average figure, obviously CFR for 80 year olds could be as high as 15% and for children is probably 0%.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
Fair enough, that's what I'm seeing as well. Testing has been heterogenous across the US, but globally South Korea and Iceland used to do the most testing and now Germany also doing a lot and the figures I'm seeing vacillate between 0.37% and 0.66%. This is an average figure, obviously CFR for 80 year olds could be as high as 15% and for children is probably 0%.
Germany, unfortunately, is much worse than that (around 2.5%), but it could be that a large number of people are not diagnosed despite being sick. South Korea have a similar figure.

To be fair, for capita, they are nowhere near the top. UAE is the second-highest after Iceland, and they have around 0.55%, though they have more people who got sick recently so it can become higher. Luxembourg are third, but they have a high fatality rate of 2%. Malta is fourth and have a rate of around 0.75%. Bahrain is fifth at testing and has a fatality rate of 0.45%.

Singapore has not done extreme testing, but they have been good at quarantining people early and doing contact tracing. Their death rate is at 0.3%.
 

Wibble

In Gadus Speramus
Staff
Joined
Jun 15, 2000
Messages
88,602
Location
Centreback
Where are people getting 19/20 being a particular bad flu season? It was miles better than both two and three years ago: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/weekly-national-flu-reports-2019-to-2020-season

I was listening to More or Less talking about this too earlier on, on how COVID-19 is killing off a lot of people who otherwise might have gone in a worse-than-average flu season.
That is idiotic because the death numbers we are using are actual daily numbers, it is irrelevant if someone may or may not die of something else later in the year. I can also bet that virus caused deaths for this whole year will be way higher than normal and that is with the measures we have in place that will also incidentally reduce flu deaths. By that logic you might as well get rid of medicine, food production regualtion and hygiene regulations because, hey, we are all going to die sometime. feckit.
 

Skills

Snitch
Joined
Jan 17, 2012
Messages
42,010
That is idiotic because the death numbers we are using are actual daily numbers, it is irrelevant if someone may or may not die of something else later in the year. I can also bet that virus caused deaths for this whole year will be way higher than normal and that is with the measures we have in place that will also incidentally reduce flu deaths. By that logic you might as well get rid of medicine, food production regualtion and hygiene regulations because, hey, we are all going to die sometime. feckit.
Or even just stop treating terminal cancer patients - because well who cares if they get an extra few years of life. It's horrible way of putting a value on human life.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
Here. In my opinion the true CFR is going to be around 2%.
How then it is a bit below that in Diamond Princess despite the extreme age shift there?

And why Iceland who has done more testing that any other country is at 0.45% (with just a few critical cases)?
 

Wibble

In Gadus Speramus
Staff
Joined
Jun 15, 2000
Messages
88,602
Location
Centreback
Just had a virus expert on the morning news here, he reckons Stockholm is “likely” up to 30-40% infected already.
Crazy numbers if so, 30% would mean almost 700,000 people.
With just over 1000 deaths nationally that makes a fatality rate the same or less than Flu? Seems highly unlikely.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,419
Location
London
Australia is running at about 1% of those tested. So it will be well below 1% as most people who have had it won't have been tested.
Yep. But at the same time, the number of those who are still infected is quite higher than the number of those who are healed. And while the death rate = number of deaths/number of infected, you can expect that some of those who are infected today, might die in the next few weeks and so the ratio will increase. Which is what eventually happened in Germany and South Korea.

But it did not in places who are doing much more testing (those that I mentioned). Until we have something more, I think that Iceland numbers should be the point of reference (though the main problem there is the relatively small sample).
 

Wibble

In Gadus Speramus
Staff
Joined
Jun 15, 2000
Messages
88,602
Location
Centreback
Or even just stop treating terminal cancer patients - because well who cares if they get an extra few years of life. It's horrible way of putting a value on human life.
The best way to elongate human lifespan would be to only give medical treatment to older people - let natural selection do its work.

However, I think I see a flaw in the cunning plan.