New Coronavirus - COVID-19

[freebeard]

I made a grocery run at 8AM. They had one-way traffic in the aisles with arrows taped to the floor.

I'm glad we can go off-topic for economical transportation. The pocket created by the stress bars is perfect for 2ea 20-liter cans.

The funniest story last night was the Venesuelan navy and the cruise ship. The cruise ship was built as an ice breaker and the navy crew "were all rescued".

[JSH]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Around half a million Chinese people, some of them infected with coronavirus, entered America from December to February at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, new figures show

It is sad that we are still using the same xenophobic logic from pandemics of the past. It doesn't matter how many Chinese people entered the USA. What matters is that people of any national origin entered the US from infected areas. Americans citizens get the virus and spread it just like Chinese citizens.

I just finished reading "Black Death at the Golden Gate" which covers the Plague epidemic in San Francisco around 1900. We did the same thing then, set up a quarantine zone but it only applied to Chinese. Whites within the zone were allowed to leave and return home and took the plague with them. This was based on racist logic that white people couldn't get plague because it was a Chinese disease caused by their inferior genetics, dirty living habits and unusual food.

120 years later we are doing the same thing.

Originally Posted by freebeard

This number of people were pouring into the U.S. while the World Health Organization was simultaneously insisting that no country should enforce any kind of border controls to stop the spread of the virus.

The WHO recommend countries test and quarantine infected people and anyone they had contact with instead of implement travel bans. It is the same method that Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan have used to limit spread of the virus. However, that method required tests that we didn't have and social restrictions we are still not willing to make.

Originally Posted by freebeard

President Donald Trump restricted travel from China from February 2nd onwards, but that was too little too late because the outbreak (which was subsequently covered up by China for two months) had started in Wuhan in November, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Yes it was too little because we never actually stopped travel from China. We banned foreign nationals who had visited China from entering the USA. Again, this assumes that foreign carry the virus but Americans don't. We continued to allow Americans to travel to China and return to the USA. We didn't quarantine them, we just told them to self-quarantine and then took no steps to insure compliance.

From today's New York Times:

430,000 People Have Traveled From China to U.S. Since Coronavirus Surfaced

There were 1,300 direct flights to 17 cities before President Trump’s travel restrictions. Since then, nearly 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have made the trip, some this past week and many with spotty screening.

We are STILL allowing Americans to return from virus hot spots without quarantine.

[redpoint5]

What does it matter how many people entered from an infection zone? If even 1 person comes back to the US infected, the result is the same; exponential spread of the disease. The difference between 1 person coming back infected and 10 people coming back infected is a delay in the timeline of spread by a couple days. It's like saying we could have got punched in the gut tomorrow rather than today.

Once the disease was here, the damage was done.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by JSH

It is sad that we are still using the same xenophobic logic from pandemics of the past.

Compare Taiwan. Their exemplary response can't be xenophobic.

Tim Pool this morning: Venezuela OPENS FIRE On Cruise Ship, Navy Deployed, Iran And China Escalating, Is Global War Coming?. It happened on March the Tenth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQaHwmnG0AI

[Xist]

Imgur is a weird place. I just regurgitated what I read here:
"What? I keep reading that Gates is evil! Do you know what Gates did before Microsoft?! You don't, do you?!" -3 points
"You know, when he was nineteen..." +11
Response: "Wot?" +5
Me: "Okay!" +4
Response: "Yeah!" +3
Response: "Indeed." +7

Is Teal'c seemingly more popular on Imgur than Lil Jon?

[freebeard]

Imgur is a weird place. I just regurgitated what I read here:

I though Imgur was an image board.

You regurgitate there what you read here or vice versa? The spelling of 'Okay' seems familiar.

Teal'c / Lil Jon

Can I buy a clue? I'm fresh out.


http://www.zpub.com/un/bill/bgates.jpeg

Gates was arrested for joy-riding a bulldozer after he started Microsoft. Before was the Home Brew Computer Club.

The Homebrew Computer Club's newsletter was one of the most influential forces in the formation of the culture of Silicon Valley. Created and edited by its members, it initiated the idea of the personal computer, and helped its members build the original kit computers, like the Altair. One such influential event was the publication of Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists", which lambasted the early hackers of the time for violating the copyrights of commercial software programs.[17]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebr...lub#Newsletter

Now it's just depopulation and RFID chips in vaccines.

[Xist]

Imgur is an image board, but people often leave comments. People usually just insult me, my post, and my mother, so you know, the usual.

Teal'c is a character from Stargate: SG1 that often said "Indeed" and it is strangely popular. I loved the show, but do not understand the fascination with that word.

I have gathered that Lil Jon is a rapper, most famous for saying "What?! Yeah! Okay!"

When I was in job school a Sergeant called cadence based on that, probably demonstrating more talent than the rich guy.

Oh. There you go. He stole a bulldozer when he was nineteen. Get your pitchforks, folks!

[freebeard]

Teal'c is a character from Stargate: SG1 that often said "Indeed" and it is strangely popular. I loved the show, but do not understand the fascination with that word.

"Fascinating' [Spock]

If the virus only persists on soft surfaces for hours, not days; can I use two or three face masks and rotate through them?

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Compare Taiwan. Their exemplary response can't be xenophobic.

They shut the border to mainland China and still got a lot of cases, which spread. Overwhelming odds are, there are people who brought the disease from Taiwan (and Singapore, and Korea, etc.) to the US. Ironically, it is precisely because they are extra xenophobic to the mainland that shutting down the border is easy.

The difference is that they stopped the spread by locking everyone at home and aggressive contact tracing aka US 4th Amendment violation :P Airplanes travel a lot faster than politicians can enact travel bans.

Also it's thought that a good chunk of the community spread in California (I know, Commiefornia, killing off blue votes :P) came from one of the people who was flown back from Wuhan. The workers where they were quarantined didn't have protective equipment and one of them tested positive later.

[Xist]

He is much like Spock, but instead of having a human mother and alien father, he is a human with a symbiote in his stomach, kind of like the Trill in NextGen and DS9, but juveniles are incubated in the abdomen. When they reach maturity they burrow to the brain stem and take over the host. They are called the Goa'uld and are the bad guys [Egyptian gods] from the movie where Kurt Russell portrayed Colonel O'Neil, not to be confused with Richard Dean Anderson's Colonel O'Neill:

They made fun of their misspelling multiple times throughout the show.

Somehow his equivalent in Stargate: Atlantis was Ronon Dex a human from another planet that is inexplicably stronger, faster, and more resilient than other humans.

It turned out that he had some connection to Conan, Declan Harp, Aquaman, and some relatively big guy in Game of Thorns.

Teal'c was as smart as anyone on his team, but Ronon didn't demonstrate any of that.

His teammates called him "Chewy."