Iran's Coronavirus Burial Pits Are So Vast They're Visible From Space (washingtonpost.com) 256
"Iranian authorities began digging a pair of trenches for victims just days after the government disclosed the initial outbreak," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "Together, their lengths are that of a football field." The Washington Post reports: Two days after Iran declared its first cases of the novel coronavirus -- in what would become one of the largest outbreaks of the illness outside of China -- evidence of unusual activity appeared at a cemetery near where the infections emerged. At the Behesht-e Masoumeh complex in Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran, the excavation of a new section of the graveyard began as early as Feb. 21, satellite images show, and then rapidly expanded as the virus spread. By the end of the month, two large trenches -- their lengths totaling 100 yards -- were visible at the site from space (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). According to expert analysis, video testimony and official statements, the graves were dug to accommodate the rising number of virus victims in Qom.
A senior imagery analyst at Maxar Technologies in Colorado said the size of the trenches and the speed with which they were excavated together mark a clear departure from past burial practices involving individual and family plots at the site. In addition to satellite imagery, videos posted on social media from the cemetery show the extended rows of graves at Behesht-e Masoumeh and say they are meant for coronavirus victims. The imagery analyst, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work, also pointed to an image showing what appears to be a large white pile of lime, which can be used to manage decay and odor in mass graves. Iranian health officials have in recent weeks confirmed the use of lime when burying coronavirus victims.
A senior imagery analyst at Maxar Technologies in Colorado said the size of the trenches and the speed with which they were excavated together mark a clear departure from past burial practices involving individual and family plots at the site. In addition to satellite imagery, videos posted on social media from the cemetery show the extended rows of graves at Behesht-e Masoumeh and say they are meant for coronavirus victims. The imagery analyst, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work, also pointed to an image showing what appears to be a large white pile of lime, which can be used to manage decay and odor in mass graves. Iranian health officials have in recent weeks confirmed the use of lime when burying coronavirus victims.
Clickbait (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clickbait (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh for fuck's sake (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial imaging satellites have a ground resolution of 24 cm or so. You can see the lines in a football field "from space" using commercial imagery.
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I was going to say, the term "from space" doesn't mean much with today's imaging technology. Anything you can make out on Google Maps satellite view is "from space" obviously.
Re:Oh for fuck's sake (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the imagery Google uses is actually from aircraft now. Not in every area but for example where you can get a 3D view it's mostly shot from aircraft.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:2)
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate this headline.
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I will admit, if Iran's burial pits are more than 100km across, that's pretty serious.
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I'm going to reverse your statement. These aren't "from space". They aren't from space because you can't see space in them.
I think we can all agree that if an image has the edge of the earth, distant stars (contrast be damned), and ground objects, then those ground objects are "visible from space".
In this case, the printed-poster would need to be about 10'000km wide before you could see both the cemetery and the edge of the planet.
"from space" describes the viewer's experience, not the camera's location.
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Yes, clueless, lazy journalism.
The official numbers from Iran way wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a great analysis of the true impact in Iran.
https://www.theatlantic.com/id... [theatlantic.com]
Here is more evidence. Over 50% of people returning to Bahrain from Iran have covid-19
https://english.alarabiya.net/... [alarabiya.net]
Iran is close to the worse case scenario for country's that don't slow the spread.
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Iran is close to the worst case scenario in everything
Re:The official numbers from Iran way wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
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1300 people don't all die in the same city. Iran is a big place. Also the article notes that the area is being dug, not that it is packed to the brim with bodies.
Re:Propaganda (Score:4, Interesting)
More than 1300 people die in Iran on average every day. Adding a hundred a day from the virus would not be noticeable in burial processes. This is pure political propaganda.
Iran has 83 million people. We expect 20%-70% of population in western democracies to get coronavirus this year, and there's no reason to think that Iran will be different, so let's say 40 million people in Iran get it. The mortality rate is 0.5% in countries which have managed to slow the peak and have capacity in their healthcare systems, 3-4% where the healthcare system is stretched thin. That works out at about 1.5 million Iranian deaths this year due to Coronavirus...
4000 deaths per day
Of course it won't be spread over a whole year. It'll be concentrated. The UK predicts 50% of all cases to arise in just a 3-week window. That suggests more like 40,000 deaths in Iran per day at peak.
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Re: Propaganda (Score:2)
You would also expect excess indirect deaths, from people who succumb to usually survivable conditions as the healthcare system is overwhelmed. Later other vital systems may collapse.
I'm not religious (Score:2)
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All the Bible predictions will come true, you simply have to wait awhile and sift through the bogus ones...such as Jesus coming back before that current generation went tits up. Admittedly, some of the more fanciful predictions might take a bit of time, and maybe they happen on a different planet, and maybe they are recoded to have become true, and maybe....this is a fool's game. Maybe you could lead a prayer seance with Pence, yes?
I await Evangelicals boldly proclaiming their faith will save them and to pr
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A true believer would french kiss.
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I'd say that the Bible concentrates on totally the wrong problems. This is peanuts compared to the plague and even the Spanish Flu a century ago.
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But a lot of people are allergic to peanuts these days.
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Re: I'm not religious (Score:2)
The Spanish Flu would be peanuts next to the Spanish Flu with the science we have now. Viruses had only recently been discovered -- in tobacco plants. Nobody even knew that's what flu is, much less had any kind of comprehensive surveillance system
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But what if this was the great plague predicted in the bible. Just what if?
Why wouldn't it be Ebola?
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3. Recipes with dates that are delicious?
Small wonder (Score:2)
All the countries sharing shisha tubes all day long will be hit hard.
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"Before you start chanting U S A and 'Murica. "
Hardly, I don't even live in the continent.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: And the real question is... (Score:3)
Well, it is supposedly hitting the prisons pretty hard, so could be both.
They are not vast. (Score:2)
A few long rows in a cemetary. That's not 'vast'.
And these days you can read newspaper headlines from space with the right equipment.
Cremation? (Score:2)
Wouldn't cremation make more sense? Is it prohibited by Islam?
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Cremation is strictly forbidden in Islam. That is why the US buried Osama bin Laden at sea, which is allowed, instead of cremating him.
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Better a coke bottle than screaming trapped underground in a rotting corpse. Eventually someone's going to drop the bottle and you'll get to *fly*.
Thousands of people with resistance ! (Score:2, Insightful)
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With mortality rate of 1 or 2%, there must be now, at least a million people with immunity/resistance.
The immune response is very weak and repeat infections can cause a cytokine storm and sudden death, probably thought ACE-2 binding affinity in cardiac and nephritic tissues.
The 1918 Bird Flu had similar characteristics. It was a 24-week event.
Link to an actual picture from space? (Score:2)
Thank you - the clickbait police.
Sanctions make it worse (Score:2)
The US is making Iran's problem much worse with the needless sanctions we have on that country. I understand that Trump feels the need to undo any good that the Obama Administration did, but dropping a bunch of new sanctions on a country that should be our natural ally is just stupid, and in the case of the corona virus, counterproductive.
Viruses don't respect borders.
Re: Sanctions make it worse (Score:2)
It's the same tried and true strategy we used to undermine the Cuban regime.
Iranian virus hotspots suspicious (Score:3, Interesting)
A work colleague in the UK's wife is Iranian. She has extensive family in Iran, which they are able to communicate candidly with using various modern channels. There is a strong feeling in Iran that the spread of coronavirus in that country was due to a targeted "seeding" of the virus. Before you wonder if my tin foil hat is on too tight, there is certainly some evidence that raises questions.
One of the main pieces of evidence is that it is not Iranian's largest cities or transportation hubs that are the epicenters, but a few specific religious centers and sects. These just happen to be the true sources of power in the country, and the religious foundation behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These are primarily elder men in protected religious enclaves that are very restricted. So it is indeed interesting how the infection took such a fast and powerful hold in these specific places, and not at the cities with airports and the like where travelers are concentrated. There are reports that it has decimated the elder religious leaders, killing a large percentage of them.
Another curiosity is simply "why Iran?", and why so fast. There are many other countries with vastly more travelers to and from China, that do not have very robust healthcare systems, that have not seen anywhere near Iran's level of infections. So again, perhaps purely coincidental, but it is curious.
The adviser to the Supreme Leader has been confirmed to have been killed by the coronavirus, and I was told that the Supreme Leader himself has not made an appearance (online or otherwise) in quite a while, so there is speculation he may be dead.
You may see some major political upheaval in Iran soon, perhaps the overthrow of the religious-based government, which is something that the majority of the population have been wanting and publicly protesting in recent months.
Re:Iranian virus hotspots suspicious (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me help you with this:
there is certainly some evidence that raises questions.
All great conspiracies start with raising wild questions that are easily explained through other more likely methods. Let's go through it:
it is not Iranian's largest cities or transportation hubs that are the epicenters, but a few specific religious centers and sects.
For deeply religious states that is not a surprise at all. transport hubs spread around large areas with varying patronage, religious centers concentrate the same people over and over again to say nothing of the strong physical contact religious centres promote. The more elder religious leaders are the more common contact with others are. Viruses love this shit.
There is a strong feeling in Iran that the spread of coronavirus in that country was due to a targeted "seeding" of the virus.
Iran is a country so distrustful of its leaders that they don't even believe their medical chief actually contracted the virus despite him sweating and coughing all over the press conference. You can take any "strong feeling" in Iran about official stories with as much of a grain of salt as you can the government info itself.
and not at the cities with airports and the like where travelers are concentrated.
Airports are very transient places that people do not hang around in. Cities with large airports haven't been effected proportional to traffic volume anywhere in the world. Hell the countries with the 3 largest airports in Europe currently have very limited cases. A better example of how disease spreads would be to look at Germany, the areas with the largest airports are mostly unaffected. The capital cities are mostly unaffected. However hotspots in the shitty Ruhr area have developed. Rough areas, crappy attitude to healthcare, decent population density, people who stick around to spread it to others, that's what causes an area to become a hotspot.
There are reports that it has decimated the elder religious leaders, killing a large percentage of them.
This will kill religious elders the world over. Old people who try to pray away their problems.
Another curiosity is simply "why Iran?", and why so fast. There are many other countries with vastly more travelers to and from China, that do not have very robust healthcare systems, that have not seen anywhere near Iran's level of infections.
Viruses discriminate. 100% of people who come in contact don't get infected. It requires a mixture of a lot of variables to become infected. The end result is literally the luck of the draw. The ability for something to spread then depends entirely on how a country or culture responds. Poor healthcare, poor hygiene. Italy is under lockdown, Austria has had only a single death. They share a completely open border. That doesn't point to some nefarious reason that Italy has had the outbreak.
The adviser to the Supreme Leader has been confirmed to have been killed by the coronavirus, and I was told that the Supreme Leader himself has not made an appearance (online or otherwise) in quite a while, so there is speculation he may be dead.
That means nothing. Trudeau's wife is a confirmed case, expect Trudeau to catch it too. It's making the rounds in the Australian cabinet. The Romanian cabinet is in lockdown. Brazil's president is infected. Even the UK's health minister is infected. These leaders come in contact with a lot of people. Expect them to have the most problems.
You may see some major political upheaval in Iran soon
I agree, but I don't think this has anything at all to do with COVID-19.
fake news (Score:2)
No one actually believes this bullshit, do they? Obvious fake news.
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Why would Ohio have such a high infection rate? Right next door PA has like 20 confirmed cases.
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Now does 100,000 cases mean that all of them will end up in the hospital? Probably not, but that's the problem with statements like these that don't get further clarification. People are free to interpret them however
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When the Socialist Europeans get production up to 10M per day, they'll be well on the way to being able to handle their own needs. We'll be needing 100M a day, every day, after that....
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The US has been beyond that point ever since the virus was discovered.
You'll be fine: It's a foreign virus and Trump has just banned all further imports.
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" iT's rAcIsT tO cALL iT wUhAn vIrUs "
ARE they Really Wuhan Virus Victims? (Score:3)
Or is it just the Mullahs cleaning up some anti-revolutionaries that have been so troublesome recently?
Seriously, mass graves? They either have (had) a crazy old/sick population or the cause of death isn't just a virus.
Re:Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:5, Insightful)
So if we wanted to be intellectually honest this would apparently be an example of free market capitalism in action because the U.S. government has removed protectionist restrictions that previously barred the Swiss company from competing in the market. The U.S. could recognize other similar healthcare savings if we did this for other drugs and healthcare products as well instead of restricting our citizens to purchase from U.S. companies that can charge higher prices due to a lack of competition. There's the government-enforced cronyism that you should be complaining about.
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lack of kits and backlog at the lab means there are more cases and official numbers say there are
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The number of confirmed cases doesn't mean a whole lot if you're not looking for cases to confirm. Even in the hardest hit WA state there's no widespread testing available yet. UW medical has set up a drive-through test facility for their workers, but otherwise it's still "are you both dying from pneumonia AND have a history of taking a cruise ship to Wuhan in the last two weeks".
Re: Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:4, Informative)
There is no capacity to test 300M people every day for the next 6 months anywhere in the world.
Screenings for symptoms and risk factors is the best you can do, it's called Triage, healthcare providers have protocols for exactly this and you're lucky nobody has to give out black tags yet.
Re: Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't seem to understand just how big a failure this has been. South Korea, a country with 1/6 the population of the US, is testing more people every day than the US has in the entire 2+ months the outbreak has been going on. Their per-capita testing rate is over 150 times higher. Even the European countries that have been waffling in their pandemic response are testing people at rates around 10 times higher than the US. You don't need to test the entire population, but you do need to test people with the symptoms and risk factors and we're not even doing that! We are not routinely testing people who are hospitalized for pneumonia, or die from it. That would be the bare minimum.
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Why would Ohio have such a high infection rate? Right next door PA has like 20 confirmed cases.
Not for very long...
Re: Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:2)
Probably slight disparities in timing for this thing getting rolling. I've been following the various local numbers for this since they've become available. They always go through an eye popping growth phase.
Delays in getting diagnosis and reporting up may play a role in early number disparities, although I'd expect Pennsylvania to be fairly quick out of the gate.
Re:Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the source, Fox "News", the company which has repeatedly gone to court to declare that its programming is "entertainment" rather than an actual news source so its reporting has no need to be factual.
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They can't get a license in Britain because of their history of bias and false reporting. In 2003 they rewrote a story on RBGH in Florida to accord with the wishes of Monsanto, and when the reporters refused to read information that they knew to be false they were fired. IIRC the reporters won about half a million dollars off the case. They claim in their own Terms of Service to be 'entertainment' (they removed 'education' claims from the TOS around 2010).
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
the USA needs healthcare for all (not ER or jail) (Score:2)
the USA needs healthcare for all not just for ER or people in jail / prsion
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> While a lot of people may and most likely will die
The worst death rate for this is under 10%. Hardly "most". It will be bad and it will be world CHANGING, but not world ending.
Re: Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:2)
Jesus you're a fucking moron. No, that's an insult to morons. Without comparing age cohorts of those confirmed to have the virus and something as basic as history of smoking, number of deaths tells you nothing from a comparative standpoint.
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Here's the thing you can't compare Canada to the US. In fact the situation here is worse then the US and I say that, living in Canada. There is almost zero testing happening, it's almost impossible to get any type of test unless you've been previously authorized by a doctor or stat nurse on site to get one. They're only testing if there's known contact, or you came from a region where it's active, tests can take upwards of 3 weeks - you read that right weeks for a result to come back. You absolutely can
Re:Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada is testing people for COVID-19 at about 8X the rate of the US (220 tests per million people, vs 26). It might feel terribly slow to someone there, but I can guarantee it's far worse down here south of the border.
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Nope. Those are just the priority cases that have already passed, only the priority cases because the person is either "important" or because they're already in the hospital showing symptoms.
If it would be comparable, here's what it would look like right now in the US. You have two testing centers, one in San Fransisco, CA and you've got one in Atlanta, GA. Those two centers are doing the tests for every state. Now, because there is no declared health emergency, no other labs can be pushed through with
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Exactly. It's difficult for people to act rationally when they are personally involved. Even more so when their health is involved.
What happened? Did you catch cataracts during a night on the town and were hoping to get them off before your tee time the following afternoon?
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Canada is testing people for COVID-19 at about 8X the rate of the US (220 tests per million people, vs 26). It might feel terribly slow to someone there, but I can guarantee it's far worse down here south of the border.
It tells you something about the state of the world today when people are competing to see whose country is doing a worse job on something...
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He's not getting a test because he's following guidelines and isolating himself due to contact with his wife. If he comes down with symptoms then he'll get the test. Until then there's a limited supply of tests and it's better to use them elsewhere. At the moment there's no tangible benefit to him using a test kit, but do grind your axe about it some more.
Genuine idiot. He was just in Iran shaking hands and kissing cheeks with high ranking Iranian's, one of which just dropped dead from this virus. That was in the last 14 days.
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It is telling I think, looking at the numbers [worldometers.info] specifically of USA and Canada, two neighboring countries that in terms of the people in society are otherwise fairly culturally similar, that considering the reported cases in the USA that have been resolved in some way (72 as of this writing), over half have died, while considering the resolved cases in Canada (12 as of this writing), only 1 has. In both countries, the active cases are far higher, and reflect a similar infection rate relative to each country's respective population (the USA is slightly worse in this regard).
But the comparison in resolved cases, I think, really highlights the difference between a country that offers ubiquitous health care and one that does not.
Canada has no technological advantages over the USA, it has nowhere near the USA's wealth, I am afraid that the only thing stopping America from enjoying guaranteed access to health care are ultimately Americans.
False, half the US infection cases have not died. Furthermore, the patients in the US that died all had health care. Deaths were primirily at one nursing home where patients were already under care but at very high risk due to health and age.
Just because Canada has universal health care doesn't stop the disease from spreading, or Canada from under reporting. Less cases happen in countries with less international travel and greater isolation among communities. Also, climate can be a factor on how long the
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The vast majority of deaths were at one nursing home. Here you go [komonews.com]. Extrapolating that to indict an entire nation's healthcare system is nonsensical.
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That's a little disingenuous as the number of cases is so small percentages mean little.
That said, I've heard that aside from compromised pulmonary system, another risk factor is obesity. And America has something like 45% obesity rates. So that's just great. To speak to your point about socialized medicine, that's going to work poorly in America if doctors can't tell people to lose weight. We're going to have to clear out a crapload of "body positivity" woketivists before that happens. Maybe COVID is just
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In matters of health, I prefer to focuse on the cases that have had some kind of an outcome than cases that are still pending, as I believe that gives a clearer picture of the actual severity of the illness so far. The ones that are still active you have no idea how they are going to end, perhaps they might impact the resolved cases negativeely, perhaps positively, but even if the resolved cases is a tiny percentage of
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I read it on the internet so it must be true!
Thanks for adding to the level of panic and bullshit and making the world even dumber, AC. I hope you're stocked up on toilet paper.
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Checking in from Cincinnati.
Horseshit.
That is all.
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Agree. Fucking idiots reporting numbers like this is what is causing panic. Christ, they are now talking about closing the bars. Let's get serious here people.
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100,000 = 1e5, not 1e6. Count the zeros.
>Stock market is crashing; retirements destroyed for the survivors
Meh, stocks are only imaginary money until you sell. Just don't sell until the market rebounds.
> This is end-times shit.
Behold the nature of panic. Just imagine if it were something dangerous... At worst it's looking to have a 3% death rate, and it sounds like probably less than a 10th of that. That's likely to kill a LOT of people, but not remotely enough to even take the edge off the overpo
Re:Just wait ... 100,000 cases already in Ohio (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything, it's self-made end-times. I have this hunch that there will be more damage from panic than from the virus itself.
RTFA (Score:3)
Reading comprehension is not good. The article said that 5 people in Ohio are infected. Prediction is for 1% of 11.7 million (117k).
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Honestly, getting it early is probably best for survival. At that point we haven't reached the point where our medical system has collapsed. In the Asian countries that were prepared for this and got on the ball quickly, they will have a less than 1% death rate. For everyone else, the death rate skyrockets up to 4-6% once it becomes too much for hospitals to manage. There are only so many doctors and nurses and once they get sick, manpower issues grow even worse. And we only have so many medical device
Re: Conspiracy Theorist (Score:2)
Might happen on a case by case basis, but a coordinated effort is not only a stupid misplacement of priorities, it would be bad politics. People aren't less alert to government skulduggery in a disaster. Quite the opposite. A disaster is fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
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Not necessary, the enemy just has to win the election. They are poised to do so.
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They've had a kind of high rate of infection among their political leadership.
I seem to have read Iran has a weird demographic curve, with a lot of young people, while a lot of political power is held by an older class tied to the religious leadership or the revolutionaries.
Given Coronavirus greater lethality among the old, it doesn't seem entirely impossible that the pandemic could reshape Iranian politics in some way by weakening the power of the clerics and senior leadership.
I mean initially it will prob
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They have a lot of young people for two main reasons. First, the Iraq/Iran war killed a huge percentage of their young men over the course of a decade, and those who didn't die were deployed away from their families for years. Second is the increase in the standard of living and improvements in health care for the vast majority of the population since the Revolution have reduced infant mortality and allowed larger families.
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start a war with Israel
You've never seen a world map, have you? If you go to the library they have ones that you can borrow with country borders outlined on them and everything, it's actually possible to see what countries share borders!
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You don't follow the news much, do you? (Score:2)
To be fair it was barely a blip next to the mess with CORVID-19, Trump's disastrous EU travel ban announcement (go look up the daily show's video on it, Trump couldn't read the tele-prompter so he made stuff up, saying we would stop trade and all travel when what he actually ordered was just blocking foreign nationals) and of course the stock market just lost all the gains made since Trump got inaugurated.
Trump (or more likely his people) is/are trying to tie Iran to the Corona virus to get
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Which is why you see it this way, you're mentally 5 to believe this is some Trump admin ploy.
See my comment above (Score:2)
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He's trying to tie Iran to the Corona virus
Iran is one of the most affected countries, and it has nothing to do with the US or Trump.
Get over yourself, just because the DNC is screwing your commie boi again doesn't mean you need to go all Alex Jones on us.
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Re: We're not really this stupid are we? (Score:2)
No, even they stupid enough to do that until the cases are down to a manageable level and *ordinary* people start looking for scapegoats.
There's plenty to be thinking about without borrowing trouble.
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The Blarney Stone is in Ireland, not Iran.
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Re: That's what happens... (Score:2)
Have you seen what televangelists in the US have been hawking? Turns out we're not that different.