UK Scientists Worry Vaccines May Not Protect Against South African Coronavirus Variant (trust.org) 238
UK scientists have expressed concern that COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out in Britain may not be able to protect against a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in South Africa and has spread internationally. From a report: Both Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19-causing virus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday he was now very worried about the variant identified in South Africa. Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said that while both variants had some new features in common, the one found in South Africa "has a number additional mutations ... which are concerning." He said these included more extensive alterations to a key part of the virus known as the spike protein -- which the virus uses to infect human cells -- and "may make the virus less susceptible to the immune response triggered by the vaccines." Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University, also noted that the South African variant has "multiple spike mutations."
Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:2, Insightful)
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The more people who get infected, the greater the chance of new mutations. One of them might make it as lethal as SARS-1. On the other hand, if that did happen, it might scare people enough to actually obey the lockdowns.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Interesting)
Viruses generally mutate to become less lethal (not more), as the evolutionary incentive is not to kill the host so that it can infect others. Paradoxically, a more lethal virus would likely kill fewer people in total. SARS COV-1 didn't kill very many because it was too lethal- people who are dying tend not to walk around and do things that spread it.
Anyhow, at the moment, we simply have no idea how current vaccines and the South African variant will interact. The good news is that extant vaccines could be tweaked if necessary, similar to how we tweak the flu vaccine annually. It wouldn't surprise me that the next few years require people to get an annual COVID vaccine in the fall along with the flu vaccines.
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Generally, yes. This one here is infectious while people have no symptoms yet and kills late.
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Yes, this is the real dilemma. COVID-19 is very mild for a large portion of the infected. It makes detection and limitation of spread much more difficult.
Most viruses with a high-ish death rates make everyone quite ill. This one is clearly an exception.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
No, they don't. Mutations are random. The selective pressure is to spread before you kill (or are killed), that's all. Sometimes that involves being less lethal, sometimes not. Untreated HIV infection is 100% fatal. Rabies too. Cholera is 30-50%. Smallpox 30%.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Insightful)
Which will result in a greater spread: a mutation that is completely asymptomatic and the host walks around contagious for two weeks, or a mutation that makes the host very sick after a few days and puts them in the hospital? The selection pressure is going to be with the mutation that spreads most widely, and making the host very sick is going to reduce spread, even if there is a delay in symptom onset.
Rabies and HIV are a bit different in that they are spread by bodily fluids. The most lethal diseases tend to use this transmission path (Ebola as well). In Rabies, behavior changes from the disease itself encourage spread. In Ebola, making the host very sick encourages others to interact through treatment. Airborne diseases don't have quite the same incentive structure.
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Which will result in a greater spread: a mutation that is completely asymptomatic and the host walks around contagious for two weeks, or a mutation that makes the host very sick after a few days and puts them in the hospital?
A virus doesn't care which has the greater spread. Evolution works only on selecting out mistakes. Unless the virus can put people in hospital before it has a chance to spread to someone else then evolution will not select out the mutation. Selection does not remove mutations until they reach a very specific extreme case, and that's one of the reasons evolution is such a muddled hot mess to get to an end goal also why monkeys still exist despite clearly the evolutionary benefit demonstrated by homo-erectus.
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Evolution is more than selecting out mistakes. It selects for traits that make it more likely for the organism to reproduce. While a disease with delayed lethality can spread just like a disease with none at all, with COVID, transmission is most likely of the infected person never becomes seriously ill. There should be evolutionary pressure away from lethality as the less lethal strains out-compete the lethal ones.
Influenza, which mutates fairly rapidly compared to COVID, is a good example of this. The 1918
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The Spanish flu was quite bad in 1918, but in 1919 was much worse, killing many young people and quite possibly a mutation on the 1918 strain.
It has also been responsible for most flu pandemics since and even today, with vaccines, kills quite a few people.
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Who says that 'more lethal' means that every carrier gets sidelined almost immediately?
The mortality could go from say 1% to 2%, but for the other 98% be totally asymptomatic and it would spread like wildfire.
Even among the newly threatened population, they may still walk around for the similar amount of time before symptoms appear and the sick person ultimately dies.
Its complicated. Sure the 'ideal' is that a lifeform is completely innocuous and is permitted to replicate freely, but it's not as simple as '
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Which will result in a greater spread: a mutation that is completely asymptomatic and the host walks around contagious for two weeks, or a mutation that makes the host very sick after a few days and puts them in the hospital?
In many ways, the virus doesn't give a damn (yes, I'm anthropomorphizing) what happens after a few weeks. If it kills the host or the host develops immunities, there is no difference to the virus. In both scenarios the virus is no longer viable in that host - so evolutionarily it stops making a difference after a few weeks no matter what the patient outcome. If a mutation allows the virus to spread more effectively, it will be favored regardless of whether the host survives.
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Successive waves of the Spanish flu were more lethal than the first. Smallpox transmission is mostly via respired particles from coughing or sneezing, quite similar to COVID. Pneumonic plague, which can be spread through respired droplets, is even more severe than the bubonic form. Tuberculosis *today* has case fatality rates of > 50% in some places; I couldn't find a good estimate for untreated TB but it was essentially regarded as a death sentence, and before effective treatments were discovered killed
false equivalence (Score:3)
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I gave lots of examples. I replied with even more. HIV is a good example *because* it demonstrates that communicability is the relevant selection pressure. HIV spreads slowly and lives long. Smallpox spreads more easily and doesn't live as long. A flu, Spanish or otherwise, spreads quickly and doesn't live very long at all.
Smallpox is a good example. It's spread in very similar ways to COVID and has a nice high fatality rate. Spanish flu is perhaps an even better example: the second and third waves were con
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Viruses generally mutate to become less lethal (not more), as the evolutionary incentive is not to kill the host so that it can infect others.
"Evolutionary incentives" are not a thing. If a virus mutates to wipe out the entire population of its hosts then the virus will also die out. Which is not much comfort.
Evolution has no foresight.
Re: Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:2)
Evolution does not reason. What you describe can still happen. Evolution tends to disfavor that happening gradually, but given thay we already have a super-infectious high-latency virus, we're way more than half way there. It only takes a little bit of mutation just to make it more lethal. No need to be "gradual" anymore.
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Congratulations, you're a moron.
Re: Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:2)
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Insightful)
Viruses generally mutate to become less lethal (not more), as the evolutionary incentive is not to kill the host so that it can infect others. Paradoxically, a more lethal virus would likely kill fewer people in total.
We all really need to stop fixating on Covid's lethality and start coming to grips with at least some of [theatlantic.com] the long term effects [theatlantic.com] of Covid-19. I say "at least some of" simply because the list of symptoms reported by Covid "long haulers" [harvard.edu] is frighteningly long - and we aren't even a year into this saga. From some of what I've been reading I'd almost rather die than with live some of the Covid after-effects for a decade or two.
And while we're on the subject of vaccines not being effective against new variants of the virus - something I've been warning people about almost since this whole thing began - fuck everybody who jumped on the 'herd immunity' bandwagon. Additionally, fuck all of our spineless leaders who didn't have the balls to force strict enough and frequent enough hard lockdowns to stop this thing in its tracks. They've bought short-term gain for long-term pain - and at this point we don't yet know how crippling the pain will be nor how long it will last. We also don't know how severe the economic effects will be of all those people who can't work and need ongoing medical care. But hey - let tomorrow take care of itself, right?
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Thank you. Even if the chance of me dying from COVID was 0% I would still do everything I can to avoid getting it. The long term effects on a normal person are potentially pretty severe and for someone like me with poorly understood pre-existing health conditions that are known to be triggered by infections there really is no telling how bad it could get.
For that reason things won't go back to normal for a long time. Even once I'm vaccinated I don't want to take that 1 in 20* chance that I'll get a horrible
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Everybody is using it off label. Because the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are around 50% effective in single shot - the second shot is effectively a booster shot.
There is evidence to believe that the reason there is so much variation is not antibodies, but quantity of antibodies - the vaccine works by having antibodies produced that attach itself to the spike protein and effectively nu
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You are supposed to get 2 shots spaced 4 weeks apart. The UK government has decided to do 2 shots 12 weeks apart, so that it can claim "X million vaccinated" even though most of them have only had one shot and the effectiveness of the second one is unknown.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, you don't have to resort to hyperbole to make a point. I have a friend with late-stage ALS who can only communicate through an eye tracker and for whom things as mundane as having other people carry him to the bathroom to wash him can potentially kill him due to the risk of lodging mucus plugs in his lungs. And he still very much wants to be alive and gets pissed off at the constant stream of people suggesting in various polite ways that he should have himself euthanized. And you're saying people with "long covid"** (I actually know a couple), which is just a small fraction of people who contract COVID, and of which we have no evidence that it "lasts for decades" at this point but whatever - should want to die, because of symptoms (fatigue, shortness of breath, memory lapses, headaches, coughing, sleep disruptions, etc) that by and large are those of poor lung function (e.g. due to lung damage)? You know that asthmatics also get such symptoms, right? Should they want to die?
It's very good to point out that COVID is not just about whether you die or whether you live. But we don't need hyperbole here. COVID sucks. Don't get it. That's enough.
(It's also worth pointing out that influenza sucks too - just not as badly as COVID. I think we as society put too little emphasis in "normal years" on stopping the spread of the flu, treating it as just "normal" and confusing it with mild colds, when for some people it can be severe or fatal. I hope COVID convinces us to do more to stop influenza in the future)
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A hard lock down is the only way otherwise you are giving the virus a large pollution of hosts in which to mutate.
You maybe right that Americans (and most of the rest of the world) may not follow a lock down, but that is basically because politicians have be lying for as long as I can remember. Now they expect people to trust them, and believe that they will act in their interest. You can blame Trump, Facebook, whatever sure those sources aren't credible but neither is you standard politician of news paper.
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long term lockdowns are simply not practical.
mainly because they won't actually stop the spread of the virus. But also because well, it's not feasible economically. You play the SJW class warfare card, in that it's about the rich getting richer, but really they'll be fine no matter what. And really, if you kill the local/small business, it's Walmart, Home Depot or Amazon that benefits (fuck, how much did Bezos' net worth increase in the last year??)
It's the small business owners and what's left of the midd
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SARS-CoV did not kill as many people because of a fundamental difference in the disease progression vs. SARS-CoV-2: the infectious phase of the former coincided with being very sick, so people stayed at home, or went to hospitals. That is why many health workers got sick and died.
SARS-CoV-2 on the other hand has the infectious phase earlier: the virus is multiplying exponenti
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Viruses generally mutate to become less lethal (not more), as the evolutionary incentive is not to kill the host so that it can infect others.
That is not at all how evolution works. Evolution doesn't provide incentives, it only culls failed mutations. COVID-19 is no where near lethal enough for evolution to have any selective role in what kind of mutations evolve.
Less lethal doesn't help the long haulers (Score:2)
The virus doesn't care if you live or die, but it also doesn't care how much suffering you do while you spread it.
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SARS-COV-1 typically showed symptoms in 2-3 days, and reports of asymptomic cases were much more limited. This plus its aggressiveness made it much easier to identify people with the disease and isolate them. This more than its lethality helped contain and eliminate it.
A very lethal virus with a lon
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Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll repeat myself from another response I made (with some customizations).
In many ways, the virus doesn't give a damn (yes, I'm anthropomorphizing) what happens after a few weeks. If it kills the host or the host develops immunities, there is no difference to the virus. In both scenarios the virus is no longer viable in that host - so evolutionarily it stops making a difference after a few weeks no matter what the patient outcome. If a mutation allows the virus to spread more effectively, it will be favored regardless of whether the host survives.
So a mutation that makes a virus more lethal but at the same time makes it more transmissible is a net win for the virus. At least as long as the lethality is slow enough. This sort of mutation will be selected for.
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random mutation + non random selection pressure => ???
the reason the common cold is so widespread is exactly because it's so mild. covid will tend towards that as well; not because it's got a hivemind telling it to lay off the mortality, but because with milder symptoms, that strain / mutation is more readily spread. As in: the host is out and about with the sniffles vs laid up in the ICU. That should be patently obvious?
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"On the other hand, if that did happen, it might scare people enough to actually obey the lockdowns."
You don't seem to realize how stupid people are.
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Maybe. I admit I've been pretty shocked that people can just shrug off hundreds of thousands of their countrymen dying gurgling in their own fluids, even denying that it's happening at all.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
Even China didn't manage to eradicated COVID with lockdowns and widespread and preexisting tracking of its people.
Yes, they did. China literally locked down the city of Wuhan, population 11 million, and did contact tracing. In fact, the Harvard Business Review wrote a lengthy article [hbr.org] on why Wuhan and other cities in China have been able to open more quickly than in the West. They had only one caveat:
Of course, it is important to note that our research focused solely on the situation in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged and was effectively brought under control many months ago through strict lockdowns, large-scale testing, and widespread contact tracing. Given the discrepancies in how the virus has spread and been managed in different locations, it is possible that our findings may not be fully applicable to other countries and regions.
Further, both Australia and China are experiencing far greater economic rebounds [abc.net.au] than the U.S. or Europe directly because of lockdowns.
Both are recovering at a much greater clip than the rest of the world, as our mid-year Budget update last week confirmed.
That's primarily down to the similar health responses, at least in terms of minimising infections. Beijing employed heavy-handed lockdown measures that all but shut down the engine room of its economy, as only a centrally planned one-party state could.
Australia and New Zealand had the distinct advantage of being islands and virtually shut out the rest of the world, a strategy that still rankles with some sections of the business community.
It's now become clear, however, as European and US health systems again approach overload, that this was the correct strategy: that fixing the health crisis was paramount to restoring confidence and growth, even if we remain isolated from much of the rest of the world.
Just as China has moved swiftly to contain recurrences, so too the moves by Victoria, South Australia and now New South Wales to isolate and eradicate outbreaks has been vital to minimising damage to the economy.
The supposed trade-off between lives and livelihoods has proven to be a false argument. It's now clear that without a healthy community, you can't have a healthy economy.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:4, Informative)
Those other countries have functioning governments that can give money to individuals and businesses to keep them afloat. Here we have one man whose sole existence is to not vote on bills. He said it even during the previous administration too.
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Then impeach him, or override him. Oh wait you can't because the rest of the system is also totally screwed.
The entire political system in the US is set up to do basically nothing very slowly, yeah Trump didn't help but the system allowed him to do it. What do you mean the president can fire the person investigating his corruption, or pardon his friends? That is total nonsense, nobody should be above the law especially the president. Hopefully the US will learn from that and change the rules but I very much
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Even China didn't manage to eradicated COVID with lockdowns and widespread and preexisting tracking of its people.
Yes, they did. China literally locked down the city of Wuhan, population 11 million, and did contact tracing. In fact, the Harvard Business Review wrote a lengthy article [hbr.org] on why Wuhan and other cities in China have been able to open more quickly than in the West. They had only one caveat:
Of course, it is important to note that our research focused solely on the situation in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged and was effectively brought under control many months ago through strict lockdowns, large-scale testing, and widespread contact tracing. Given the discrepancies in how the virus has spread and been managed in different locations, it is possible that our findings may not be fully applicable to other countries and regions.
According to my sister-in-law (born, raised, and lives in Hong Kong), over a million people fled Wuhan before the lockdown. It is nearly impossible to know how many were infected.
Re: Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:4, Insightful)
China is country where texting the wrong words in a private conversation with a friend get picked up sent to the re-education camp. That is not an exaggeration, it happens. Even the doctor who exporsed COVID in the first place was silenced.
We know there have more covid outbreaks in China, we don't know there extent. We don't have good enough human intelligence; but if you actually think anything reported out of China on COVID or a host of other subjects is anything other than state approved propaganda, you are either a Chinese agent, or a rube.
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Not surprising, they have more reason through experience than the US.
Ah, your CCP leanings exposed.
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The one time being an island might have been a good thing for the UK and it completely failed to make use of it. You can still fly in to the UK, into a crowded airport, and there are zero checks.
Credit where credit is due, especially to New Zealand which had probably the most exemplary response in the "Western" world.
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In fairness, being an island has been a good thing for the UK many times in history.
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That's a very long debate. IMHO Albert has a lot to answer for.
Re:Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
If you can't imagine it, I guess you could look at Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, any number of other SE Asian countries.
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They did stop it but unfortunately they live in the world, and you can't stop all travel, if the rest of the world had done the same it would have it for good. In New Zealand you get outbreaks every so often because of overseas travelers, (which I think they should tighten the restrictions on)
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As of Jan 3:
Japan cases / million: 1940; deaths: 27
US cases / million: 62,345; deaths: 1062
Japan didn't exterminate the virus, but they've done a good job of controlling it. "New wave" is a relative term.
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You're a joyous human being, aren't you?
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Hmm...rather than lock down the entire world.
Why don't we isolate and lock down South Africa to contain this new variant?
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Why don't we isolate and lock down South Africa to contain this new variant?
Too late for that now.
...that emerged in South Africa and has spread internationally...Both Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19...
Re: Welcome to 2021, new 2020 (Score:2)
Well, if we get lucky, it'll be long before old age. ;)
#mmmLovinCovId
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We will all die of old age before lockdowns are over.
That increasingly appears to be the intent, regardless of the status of the pandemic.
This is why we needed a proper response (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it this way, every time somebody says "We can't do that because of the economy" replace "the economy" with "some businessman's yacht money". Try it:
"We can't lock down to control the virus because of some businessman's yacht money"
See, makes much more sense.
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Your fundamental misunderstanding of basic economic principles leaves you blind that the issue that it
You're thinking in terms of cash (Score:5, Insightful)
You're boxed in on your thinking from years and years of "America, Fuck Yeah!" style economics. Everything has to be solved with the Free Market, even though that market isn't even close to free, never was and never can be. There are no lack of goods, we haven't cut production on anything important. It's a bit hard to get a guitar or a video card right now, but again, food and shelter are plentiful. We could easily pay restaurant & bar workers to stay home for a year (or very likely 3-6 months) while we sort this out and get the vaccine out there.
There's 2 problems with that. First, businessmen's yacht money. But second (and much more significant) if we display to the world that we can easily pay 1/3rd of the population to not work for 3-6 months people are going to start asking questions. Questions like "It's 2020, why am I still working 50 hours a week for just enough money to get by?".
And if that happens folks are gonna get out of that "America, Fuck Yeah!" box. They're going to start questioning why the future we were promised (remember that?) never came. Why productivity is way, way up but real wages when taking the Big 3 (healthcare, education, housing) into account are way, way down. Why our lives our so fragile....
Billions were spend creating the narrative that "we can't afford it" and that 60-70% of the population living 1 paycheck or 1 minor illness from disaster is OK. A proper response to the pandemic would've shattered that.
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There's 2 problems with that. First, businessmen's yacht money. But second (and much more significant) if we display to the world that we can easily pay 1/3rd of the population to not work for 3-6 months people are going to start asking questions. Questions like "It's 2020, why am I still working 50 hours a week for just enough money to get by?".
And the answer will of course be so you can contribute enough to carry all those who can't or wont contribute when the government decides they should get a free ride sitting at home for 3 months because of some virus.
You're distracted (Score:2)
Think back to when you were little, when you were told the future would be great. A future that wasn't full of drudgery and misery. Start asking yourself why you never got that. Start asking yourself who did. Who's always been the ones with everything.
I'll close with this: Ayn Rand is not your friend. Atlas can go ahead and shrug. The only thing he's holding up is progress.
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We didn't shut down the economy, we shut down bars & restaurants.
Where I live, we also shut down gyms, all shops except for food, hairdressers, any kind of entertainment venue. Such shut down means that whole sectors of the economy are shut down and other sectors of economy that depend on these are partially shut down.
What you suggest, while sounds feel-good is a childish fantasy based on lack of understanding just how interconnected economy is. If you could just pay people to do nothing by printing money, why then in places that tried to do just that, like Venezuela
You're assuming the shutdowns would be permanant (Score:3)
As for printing money, go for it. You can print as much money as you want up to your economy's ability to absorb it. When is that? Well it's a function of how much real, actual goods you economy can produce. If you print more than your economy can produce with the productivity you got then you get hyper inflation.
We are nowhere's
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You have a very flawed understanding of economic output.
Ok, what have we lost? (Score:2)
Maybe... The lo
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If you want to save the economy you need short but hard lockdowns and then a really, really effective testing and contact tracing system. Get it under control, then keep it under control.
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all this anti-lockdown bullshit because businessmen didn't want to pay the taxes to keep the economy going during lockdowns means we've been letting the virus spread and mutate like crazy.
Try and remember that portions of our economy are essential for human survival. Paying taxes was not the driving factor behind keeping food production going. Or hospitals, law enforcement, prisons, military, etc.
And in the beginning we tried to define "essential" personnel to limit the spread. That was quickly corrupted and ignored by our very leaders.
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businessmen didn't want to pay the taxes to keep the economy going during lockdowns
How would you tax a business that is not running during a lockdown? Taxes are based on profit/income made by running your business.
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"We can't lock down to control the virus because of some businessman's yacht money"
OTOH, they prefer to keep yachting, where they're less likely to catch the virus.
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The businessmen are the only ones with money (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually addressing the pandemic would be better all around, it would save money. But the problem is getting that money in the first place. The folks in charge don't want to let even one red cent slip through their grasp. Once guys like you and me, that work for a living, learn that we don't have to live in desperate fear of economic ruin every 10 years when the businessmen crash the economy with their stock market gambling we're not gonna wanna let that go. And their goes their yacht money.
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353,640. COVID Infected: 20,825,423. US Population via Census 2020 [worldometers.info]: 332,011,962. Death percentage: 0.1%. Infected percentage: 6.3%.
You seem to think these numbers make a compelling case for not locking down. Maybe you need to think about it a bit differently. For example, would you eat food that had a track record of giving food poisoning to 6.3% of people who consumed it? After all, 15 out of 16 people can eat it with impunity. Would you get on an airplane for a transatlantic flight if you knew it had a 0.1% chance of crashing? One out of a thousand is practically a guarantee that you'll arrive safely, right? (never mind that the FAA
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The death rate in the US is about 2.85% if you use include RECOVERED statistic
DEATHS / RECOVERED = DEATH RATE.
available here:
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
and on many other COVID infection reporting sites.
And like everything this is only a snapshot of the moment you click on the website also known as a snaphot of now.
And if immunity for the RECOVERED is not permanent then this statistic will be low compared to reality which is yet to be determined.
you can't own property, man (Score:2)
It's not your money. At least that's how the government and the banks see it. Modern economic theory even admits that money is only supposed to pass through your hands before moving on. An individual's control over "their" money is designed to be quite brief. Eventually you send a big portion on to the government for taxes or onto a bank for a mortgage.
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Also "Companies reap the rewards of free education, while they pass on that money to the rich stockholders". That's how socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for the poor works. Thank you, extremely-right wing republicans and very-right wing democrats.
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The thing about corporate profits is that they need to be cashed out at some point.
Not true. They can be transferred overseas or used for business expenses like "corporate jets" and "golf club lunches".
(...which will only ever be available for the bosses to use)
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As a % of the total expense the wages are minute, most of the money just goes to other corporations that don't get taxed.
Re: This is why we needed a proper response (Score:4, Insightful)
What is so difficult to understand here? Do people really not understand how voluntary exchange works? Does milk materialize in the refrigerator because Allah wills it? Did The Party invent the refrigerator? How the fuck do you think the lights comes on when you flip a switch?
Liberals believe that groceries come from the grocery store and electricity comes from the wall socket.
Re: This is why we needed a proper response (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ask yourself if Amazon did not have access to those roads and such you claim they don't pay for would it cost them more or less to get items to you? Do you not think that one of the following would happen:
1) Amazon would simply decline you business; sorry we can't deliver to that location.
2) They'd pass the deliver costs along to you.
So the answer is you have those and pay taxes to support stuff like roads because YOU want the opportunity to do business with the Amazon's of the world. They don't owe you f
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So you agree with us business should not pay taxes; because it creates inequities. it would be better to have individuals pay all taxes.
You mean there's a chance for this planet? (Score:5, Funny)
We can still prevent the massive extinction event, by curing is from the planetary pathpgen called ... humanity?
Signed,
literally all the animals and plants and fungi and single-cellers of the planet.
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Wait! We love humanity! Don't go!
Signed,
Cockroaches, pigeons, and squirrels
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Short response to those promoting it - You first.
Awesome (Score:2)
Wasn't the zombie plague in World War Z (the book, not that godawful movie) originally called South African Rabies, but also originated in China?
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Wasn't the zombie plague in World War Z (the book, not that godawful movie) originally called South African Rabies, but also originated in China?
No, the lockdown plan that turned the zombie spread from unstoppable to manageable was called the South African Plan. It was based on an actual South African government plan from Apartheid days.
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yes, it was nicknamed south african rabies, IIRC because that's where the first big outbreak was.
This just goes to show (Score:5, Interesting)
when it comes to epidemics, finding someone to throw under the bus doesn't work.
I worked for many years as a software vendor in the public health field; I even was once at the CDC Fort Collins center when they were scrambling a team to investigate an outbreak of a hemorrhagic fever in Africa. The strategy was the same one used in the War on Terror -- fight it over there so you don't have to fight it over here.
But in the past four years preemptive international public health efforts have been seen as a kind of foreign aid give-away, and US readiness has suffered. It probably didn't make any difference in *this* case, but COVID-19 isn't the end of that story. It's just one chapter.
Re: (Score:2)
We are all looking at outbreaks differently from now on now that we have experienced it first hand across the world. Well, most people at least I'd say.
But it's also not about "throwing people under the bus". It's about acting responsibly and making sure that people do. When we here in the UK found a new mutation did we spread the news of it and didn't first wait until every single last researcher agreed with the findings despite some initial scepticism.
And one can blame us for having created this new mutat
Re:This just goes to show (Score:5, Informative)
The US CDC used to have a resident medical epidemiologist embedded in China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention who trained CCDCP field epidemiologists and would have known when the people she trained deployed to Wuhan. US CDC maintains a small presence in China but only knows what the Chinese government tells it; the resident advisor would have had back channel information on the severity of the crisis, had her position not been eliminated by the White House in July of 2019.
The positive take-away (Score:3)
The face masks that I bought for Christmas with happy, festive motives will find another use this year. Guess they'll go into the same box as the Christmas lights.
Pulling the plug on prevention? (Score:3)
Initially it was thought mutations would be low for this type of virus, but if that turns out incorrect and it mutates faster than vaccines can keep up, there will be pressure to give up on social isolation and let it circulate for "Darwin" to sort out.
It will be considered worth the trade-off to let 2% or so die so that normal life can continue on for the 97% (assuming 1% have problematic side effects.)
I'm not saying whether I agree with that philosophy, but the political pressure will build.
As a layman (and South African), I'm so confused (Score:2)
Conserved Region Vaccines (Score:2)
This is precisely why the non-pharma people have advocated for conserved-region vaccines. Once we understood that many people got a mild case because they'd previously had common-cold betacoronaviruses and the immune system responded to the parts of the virus that were the same ("conserved regions") then the smart thing to do, around March, was to develop a traditional vaccine using a common-cold betacoronavirus with existing technology. This could have been done by September.
But no, whiz-bang mRNA experi
Re: (Score:2)
We have already developed these vaccines the fastest that ANY HAVE EVERY BEEN DEVELOPED AND TESTED.
The mRNA took the same length of time as regular vaccines, but only because a lot of new development had to happen.
For the next time a vaccine is needed, we are likely looking at 3-6 months from time of isolation and that is still with fast testing.
And BTW, almost all of the other vaccines ARE being developed exactly as you suggest; using genetic engineering on established virus, but these h
of course (Score:2)
I hope you all know that this Covid thing is never going away ...
we very much have reason to be concerned (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Man you are a sick puppy...
Re: More Communist Fear Mongering (Score:2)
The fascists? Everyone in power wanted war. Liberals, conservatives, progressives, authoritarians, socialists, capitalists, and everyone in between. Even Europe saw that shit and started preparing for another Middle East invasion.
Re: (Score:2)
pfft, those people aren't dead. "death" is a liberal myth, people don't actually die, the gubbermint just takes you away to work in salt mines on mars for eternity when THEY DECIDE you're no longer useful to society.
Re: (Score:2)
https://miro.medium.com/max/87... [medium.com]