Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

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Our mask mandate didn't get extended again, so that expired yesterday, thank god. Still required in schools and such, and the governor is continuing to encourage their use, but at least you can't get in legal trouble for it anymore. Other restrictions are being relaxed more as well.

Businesses are generally doing better from what I can tell, except for the movie theaters. I've been going to one of them in particular for the last few weeks (they were showing the extended editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies, as well as the Akira remaster), and I basically had the whole theater to myself. Not just the screen I was watching, but the entire building. Staff was barebones, and I didn't often see a lot of other patrons; the most I saw was when I went to see Return of the King and there was a group of five in the theater with me. Other than that, it was one or two other people at most. On the bright side, I also had nice conversations with the few people who were there, patrons and staff alike.

I don't think it's a fear of congregating in public that's keeping people away from the movies, however. I drive past a bowling alley to get to that theater, and every night I did, the parking lot was packed full of cars. I think it's mostly a lack of new movies that explains the low population. I love seeing classics on the big screen (Akira was gorgeous), but it's nowhere near as much of a draw to the general public as the latest capeshit blockbuster. But studios aren't willing to release movies into theaters again when they think that the public won't go, so we're in something of a catch-22 situation here: people won't go because there's nothing new to see, but studios won't release new movies if people won't go.

It makes me a bit worried for the future of my local theaters since they're where I like to go when I go out. Still, I'll continue to patronize them as long as I'm able. Is the same sort of thing happening where you guys live?
 
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lol remember when niggas thought Boris Johnson was going to die from this shitty virus now he's got you limeys all locked up.
Never feel sorry for any head of state regardless of your political leanings, glad to see that the rally in London had thousands of people. More and more waking up to this mess lets keep the pressure on them
 
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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1311521229468250112 (https://archive.vn/Dx90y)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/ski-party-pandemic-travel-coronavirus.html (https://archive.vn/Hiu7N)
 
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Save the Loli said:
Probably. The goalposts have been moved from "flatten the curve" (reduce deaths) to simply "eliminate deaths" to "reduce cases" and we are now at "eliminate cases". After we "eliminate cases" we'll move onto "well the numbers and deaths are underreported so let's make sure the pneumonia and flu cases are gone too."

Costume masks are bad all of a sudden? You mean you can dress as a surgeon or a Crip or a plague doctor and get into stores but it's bad if you dress as a surgeon or a Crip or a plague doctor and go trick or treating?
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"What, you don't want to eliminate all infectious disease? What are you, a Nurgle cultist?"-Lockdown supporter, probably.

It's a pretty neat idea for woke lunatics though. A time set aside to cleanse diseases both physical and mental (i.e. wrongthink), where we shut down society to rid ourselves of these scourges once and for all (or so they believe), and then re-emerge in "paradise". Of course those who provide the teachable moments get to run around mask-free, they're part of the mental side of this great "healing". It sure gives us plenty of time for self-reflection, and we all know how confident they are that resistance to their bullshit is only borne from thoughtlessness and malice.
 
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So Ohio's Governor's latest insanity. Pay attention to the second tweet. There isn't an ICU in the state that would let someone in without a mask, but none of his spread stories ever have any real details so I assume they're mostly made up. He's also back to listing counties as Red while they're not actually meeting the metrics to be considered red. What's worse, is people were expecting him to loosen up the last call time for bars, since Cincinnati bars are losing tons of business to Kentucky and I'd assume other bars near the state lines are too. Instead, ratchet down harder while spreading obvious bullshit to justify it.
 
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A restaurant group in Ireland is threatening to sue the government if the restrictions are extended, saying they're unconstitutional and not based on scientific evidence. The restrictions in Dublin are currently supposed to go on until the 10th (no one believes this will end on the 10th) so the government has until the 6th to confirm restrictions will be lifted or the lawsuit will be filed.



I'm kind of surprised it took so long.
 
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Jarolleon said:
"What, you don't want to eliminate all infectious disease? What are you, a Nurgle cultist?"-Lockdown supporter, probably.

It's a pretty neat idea for woke lunatics though. A time set aside to cleanse diseases both physical and mental (i.e. wrongthink), where we shut down society to rid ourselves of these scourges once and for all (or so they believe), and then re-emerge in "paradise". Of course those who provide the teachable moments get to run around mask-free, they're part of the mental side of this great "healing". It sure gives us plenty of time for self-reflection, and we all know how confident they are that resistance to their bullshit is only borne from thoughtlessness and malice.
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I fucking hate the lockdown cultists. They seriously think that it would be in any way possible to lock down the entire country and stop the virus before it ever got out of hand, and then we would have all been done with this months ago.

So it's thought experiment time.

First, let's isolate the problem to just the Wu Flu: Anyone who has the coof will basically be done with it in two weeks, so if they isolate for a month, they should be over it by the time they get back out to interact with anyone else. Thus, if the entire country isolates for a month, all cases will have burnt themselves out, and the pandemic will be done. Easy peasy.

But it's really not that simple. For starters, I can guarantee that most people will not have the supplies to last for a month without going outside. Preppers and others who live in disaster-prone areas are likely to have emergency food supplies on hand, but the overwhelming majority of the country will only have food to last a couple weeks at most. We already see the first problem with this plan, but obviously it's going to get worse.

This is where essential workers come in. Obviously, there need to be people providing the essential services that keep society running: food, water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, medicine, and so on. Anyone who's working in any of these industries will have to go out and continue working, at the risk of spreading the coof to each other. But it's a necessary sacrifice to ensure that the rest of the country can properly isolate.

But then the question comes in: what's "unessential?" There are lots of workers associated with each of these industries, and they all have to keep working to ensure that things are still running. Going back to food, we have farmers, processing plants, truckers, and store workers all required to work to get food from the farm to the table. You've also got to get water to the farms, electricity to the processing plants and grocery stores, and fuel to the truckers and other workers, as well as gas for individual citizens' cars so they can keep buying food. That's a bunch more industries that are essential to keeping things running, along with other industries that support those, and so on. It gets to the point where you realize that pretty much no industry is unessential (except for journalists, probably). Sure, some people can transition to working at home, but not everyone is lucky enough to swing that.

So because we have so many people that need to keep working, a full countrywide lockdown would never have worked out. But let's assume that everyone had enough supplies to last a month, the electrical and telecom grids were automated well enough to stay running until the lockdown ended, and all these problems were fixed. We got the virus under control, and all it cost us was a month of our time.

The obvious follow-up question: what happens when one person with the Wu Flu comes into the country from another one, especially if they're not caught upon entry because they weren't showing symptoms?

We'd immediately be back at square one with who knows how many infected spreading it around, and we'd have to go back into another month's lockdown nationwide to let it burn itself out again. Even if we assume that all our systems could run automatically for a month, and even if we assume every single person in the country had enough supplies to handle a lockdown, I don't think it's reasonable to assume we could do it all over again in such a short period of time.

So at this point, if we assume that lockdowns are the only way to beat the coof, the only possible solution is for the entire world to go into lockdown. Yeah, good fucking luck there. Wrangling even a single smaller country is hard enough, but every single nation on the planet? There's no fucking way you could manage that. And yet, for some reason, our leaders tried to do just that, with devastating results.

If anyone has any holes they can poke in my reasoning here, let me know. I've spent a while thinking about the logic behind lockdowns, and my conclusion is that it's all fucking retarded. I don't think there's been a single case in history of quarantining a healthy population to fight a disease, but that's exactly what we did, and I still don't know why (aside from the obvious "never let a good crisis go to waste" tinpot dictators out there).
 
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California adds COVID-19 equity requirement. It could trip up counties’ reopenings
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-01/coronavirus-reopening-health-equity-metric (https://archive.vn/5TmHd)
Excerpt:
California’s larger counties will not be permitted to reopen their economies further unless they reduce coronavirus infections in the hardest-hit places where the poor, Black people, Latinos and Pacific Islanders live.

Under a new state requirement for reopening during the pandemic, counties with more than 106,000 residents must bring infections down in these places and invest heavily there in testing, contact tracing, outreach and providing means for infected people to isolate. Los Angeles is one county sure to be affected, along with others in Southern California.

The measure is designed to ensure that test positivity rates in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods do not significantly exceed a county’s overall rate, a disparity that has been widespread during the pandemic.
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This is insanity. I feel sorry for all of the Kiwis from California (more than I usually do).

edit: Trump has also tested positive for the coronavirus. But I'm sure you know that by now if you live in the modern world. Hang on right, things are going to get crazier.
 
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King Dead said:
I don't think there's been a single case in history of quarantining a healthy population to fight a disease, but that's exactly what we did, and I still don't know why
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It was a panic reaction that gained too much inertia and became too useful. Most western response plans for dealing with a pandemic assumed it would be influenza, which has well-studied transmission properties, infection rates, and outcomes, and a certain level of base immunity within the population. Under those plans, the protocol would be to hospitalise severe cases, keep less severe cases quarantined, and attempt to achieve herd immunity, relying on the initial base immune response to speed things up, until a more permanent solution was found.

That's why the initial response was to put severe cases on ventilators. A flu can become severe enough to require a ventilator for a short while, because it clogs up your lungs and makes breathing difficult, but it doesn't damage them in the way that a severe coronavirus infection does.

The problem is, it didn't work. Coronavirus fucks your lungs hard if it gets a strong foothold there. It's effect on the immune system is different from influenza as well; it almost turns your immune system against you, though it isn't quite an autoimmune disease itself. The result is your lungs getting turned to mush and left vulnerable to subsequent pneumonic infections. Flu doesn't do that, except in cases so severe that you're dead no matter what happens.

And we don't have the same base immunity to corona that we have to flu. There are some relatives lurking around, but this one was novel enough to spread rapidly, unhindered, and largely unnoticed, for months.

But I said it was a panic reaction. By itself, this coronavirus isn't all that deadly. If you reduce the initial viral load, it basically doesn't do anything to you except reproduce enough to pass on to someone else. The panic was primed first by China's response to the virus, welding people into their homes, and then by the complete collapse of Milan's healthcare system, as the virus started showing up. Hospitals there were already under strain on the best of days, overcrowded, poorly funded, and with long waiting times for services. The influx of an unexpected number of very ill people, who all seemed to require ventilation, overwhelmed their resources and created a perfect storm of panic-inducing death porn. The sigh of a ward filled with people on ventilators created the impression that this was a highly contagious disease with a high death rate.

Everyone assumed it had just arrived that month, and was going to tear through the population like a wildfire. That modeller faggot in the UK, who had been demanding lockdowns every time someone sneezed for the last 20 years, got his model into the limelight and boosted the panic with wild predictions of millions of deaths worldwide, even if everyone was locked in their homes for months.

After that, it was pretty much inevitable that politicians worldwide would respond by locking everyone up. The virus wasn't reacting to their national response plans in the way it was supposed to, normal treatments just seemed to make things worse, and doomers started appearing with predictions of terrible fates for everyone that caught it. Locking everyone up was the only thing they could think of, and once one or two countries did it, everyone else followed along like panicked sheep. The ad-hoc strategy of "flattening the curve" to prevent overwhelming the health services, was used to justify the lockdown. That strategy itself was based on experience of Milan, which as I said, was already on the verge of collapse even before severe cases showed up. It only made sense if you assumed the majority of cases would require long-term hospitalisation and ventilation.

tl;dr the why is: politicians are human, saw a scary situation, panicked when their initial plans didn't work, and went full retard. Now it's become convenient to perpetuate the current state of affairs.
 
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