What really pisses me off right now with COVID is this.
We have known to quaruntine infected areas for centuries. The word quaruntine comes from '40 days' in Italian which is how long ships and sailors would stay abord vessels during the plague to stop the spread. It's a 17th century term.
We have known about the germ theory of disease in more or less its current form for just shy of 200 years.
We had an influenza pandemic that generated a huge wealth of information about how such things spread and are contained just over a hundred years ago.
We've seen countless pandemics and epidemics of lesser severity since then which again have given us loads of case studies regarding how best to go about containing them and minimizing loss of life.
We had several very good examples of how to tackle this specific pandemic from primarily south east Asian countries.
So yeah, every lying, conniving sack of shit politician acting as if this is a never seen before uniquely complex scientific and social problem and every toadying, arselicking media pundit who reinforces this great lie, this myth that our governments simply could not possibly know what to do or what would happen can catch the damn thing and we'll just stick them on a plague island like they did back in the middle ages.
That's exactly how the DPRK was able to get away with zero deaths from COVID despite having limited material resources. :juche-boi: The solution was simple: close the border and keep everyone at home. It required only solidarity and organization.
That RFA story? lol. Do you believe they all wear the same haircut too?
That's pretty easy when the restrictions to get in and out of the country are already draconian.
I mean, it was definitely easier than closing off a country with as much international travel as Italy, but the country is not as isolated as the propaganda has you believe. There is no concept of a border [between the DPRK and China]. People come and go as they please.
Of course the DMZ is a different story.
Americans can't go there because the US government banned it's citizens from travelling there. DPRK actually let's us come, it's our government that doesn't. Same with Cuba
You need a passport. I don't know how difficult they are to obtain, but the woman in that video was a dressmaker and she had a DPRK passport.
Honestly even accounting for relatively lower travel in and out the country, we are doing worse than the government held up in the public eye as batshit insane, evil and incompetent.
Yeah COVID is basically the match that has lit the fuse for our downfall in this system. We were already on a path towards recession and some hard consequences of living in neo-liberalism but this is going to really push us over the edge.
They think they can continue the manipulation due to having better tools than ever.
I'm terrified they are right.
they wanna die. Honestly if I was in their position, keenly aware of how incompetent everyone around me, I’d wanna fuck off to oblivion.
Yup. Read about this months ago. It’s the new “flu” but their will likely be a sars3 so even if we do vaccinate it will evolve. Shits fucked. And to think I told my brother it would be around for 18 months and he yelled at me for being negative.
There was a mutation in Denmark, from jumping to minks, mutating, and back to humans again...
I think they have around 150 confirmed cases related to the farms, and a bunch of farms are being ordered to put down their animals.... Yes fun stuff
probable, if nothing is done to control outbreaks on fur farms.
man, carnism can't just not help but make covid and make it worse
i remember when they were saying 2-3 million at worst and everyone was like ah that's not too bad. Let's just reopen everything right now.
What pisses me off the most is how the international left missed a huge chance and no matter how dire the situation people still don't make the right assumptions. The way some lib co-workers looked at me when I said "this crisis finally exposed that the free market does not work". And even though they agreed that we don't have the same problems America has because we introduce some social policies, I'm still the crazy one. A day later the Pope said the same thing, but I'm the radical... Lol
Doesn't covid 19 mutate far slower than the seasonal flu? And for that reason, couldn't we vaccinate it out of existence?
Honestly I think that it'd be easier than pushing Biden left. Trump used to be a Democrap. He basically stands for absolutely nothing except himself.
I did a search and the articles I found suggested that it will eventually become less deadly and more of a common cold type illness; do you have any links to pieces that have a less optimistic outlook?
It will definitely evolve to become less deadly over time, but I haven't seen anyone estimate how long that might take. Are we talking a few years, or many decades? No idea.
There is no evolutionary incentive for it to evolve to become less deadly. That pressure simply doesn't exist. You can see how stable it is here: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
Literally, "Winter's Coming"... we're moving into the colder season in the US, evictions are starting, unemployed cant find new jobs, employed can get enough money, medical system hasn't had time to recover from the fucking it just got, and in the chuddly areas I live in folks are wearing masks less and less...
I always tried to avoid accelerationist thoughts but, if I can't find the remote I guess this is what I'm going to watch right?
lol doomers just digitally self harming themselves even if it is true are you gaining from trying to absorb this ?
Even if I try to think positively about this, it's not like you need evidence that things are fucked. Before someone says righteous anger, im gonna tell you that this shit used to make me plenty mad. mad enough that everything seemed impossible.
"digital self harm" isn't that far off the mark. My day only gets worse when I dive into that shit.
This is the rhythm of the nightThis is the rhythm of my life
I wonder if we aren't going to see a drastic death toll from this, if it simply doesn't go away from now on. The coronavirus has a 5 to 10% mortality rate, even more so when it comes to boomers/sick/fat people. And when it doesn't kill you, it leaves permanent scars on your brain (yes, even cognitive functions are affected). Unless they find a vaccine relatively quickly, we're boned.
Mortality rate is more like 0.3-0.7% (CFR) by most recent measures. We have gotten a lot better at treating it, mostly because our paradigm of the use of early intubation in worsening acute respiratory failure doesn't really apply to covid. In fact, we learned that you need to avoid intubation at all costs if possible - even if that means permitting oxygen saturations well into the low 80s. We also now know the role of corticosteroids, convalescent plasma, and which inflammatory markers to trend.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a serious deal, but much less scary than earlier this year where CFR was around 1.4% and we didn't quite understand transmission well.
I do wish we had more guidance on managing outpatients though. Right now it's pretty much "stay at home and if you feel worse go to the hospital" (although I'll sometimes throw corticosteroids and antibiotics at my chronic lung disease patients).
We will definitely get through this. Don't worry. Expect a vaccine in spring or early summer, with roll out throughout the rest of the year. Things will start to return to normal after that but masks will be the last thing to go because they are so damn easy to implement (and they are effective).
So save your doomerism for...uhhh...(gestures widely) pretty much everything else about this capitalist hellhole.
You're probably right, but this sounds like the best case scenario, where people get the medical help they need. What happens when hospitals can't answer the needs of an ever-growing infected population ? Or even worse, that a poor country with a bad medical system can't control the pandemic ?
And even if it somehow happens like you predict it, it's still millions upon millions of lives lost if the epidemy becomes seasonal. But thank you for your post regardless, I indeed didn't know about the change in the mortality rate.
Any viable vaccine is still several months to years away, then mobilization, manufacturing, and distribution will add another couple years, and the elites will have priority over the working class, anyway.
I'm so fucking done with all of this. I can't keep going to work, doing a 10 hour minimum wage shift, going home and quarantine alone until my next shift 10 hour minimum wage shift.
