A lot of people also seem to forget that the flu exists concurrently, Covid-19 deaths don't "replace" flu deaths, people still die from the flu just the same. So when people say "it doesn't kill much more than the flu" then well, the flu is killing its usual amount of people and Covid-19 kills more people in addition.

I don't understand it either. The official story is that 'they wouldn't survive anyway,' but fuck me there's still going to be that odd old person that survives when you put them on a ventilator. But looking at the prime minister's speech at the beginning of all this, Sweden was resigned to a deadly fate - there were certainly no messages of hope, just "We should expect many loved ones to die" - very defeatist attitude. God help us if/when the Russians ever invade this place, we'd be absolutely fucked.

You're forgetting that the nation of sisu exists right between you and them.

I've been to Finland a few times, have quite a few Finnish friends, love the language and am all about the sisu. But I think the biggest difference here is that Stalin didn't have 5,000 nuclear weapons to play around with. Eating iron and shitting chains will only get you so far in that situation

I would think politicians would listen to the experts when they make that comment but a lot do not.

Politicians are generally responsive to their constituents. Politicians aren't the reason people want to run around mask-free as a devotional to their god-emperor. Voters are the problem here.

They're a problem, but they're not the root problem. They're deliberately misinformed by people who are either interested in keeping things going, in selling snake oil, or in seeing people in [insert country name] tear themselves apart; sometimes those people include the politicians themselves, either because they see an easy way to score points on agitated, misinformed people, or because they're in cahoots with one of the aforementioned people.

Aaaaand another person's out for having a different opinion.

Like, it's cool to have a contrarian opinion about whatever, politics/religion/whatever. But when it's about science, and especially when it's about a pandemic, it's far less so. Opinions are built on a mix of values, emotions, and facts that back it up. Contrary to popular notions, there are shit opinions that have little facts backing them up, and in this case, those opinions do have serious repercussions in the real world.

Or, you know, he was being a rambling, trolling cunt that spewed conspiracy theory bullshit.

While I can agree about the ugliness of that, the question of what countries methods failed should be answered after the situation is over, which may take years. Number of dead, and other problems caused by the various methods of various countries aren't limited to those contracting the virus. For example, the number of suicides, domestic abuse, drug abuse, evictions, etc. can increase when alot of people lose their jobs due to a lock-down.

And also, like I said before, the number of dead directly from the virus is going to increase as countries open up from a lock-down. So to look at current rates and conclude which countries handled it better than others is impossible, since the virus isn't going away soon.

Yeah, cause trolling and vomiting disinformation about a deadly pandemic is totally an opinion worth sharing and that is conducive to intelligent conversations...

I repeated the argument about the ICU wards shutting down and doctors dying to a dude on the internet who’s all in on this being a big hoax and was told I’m an “ignoramus”. It’s amazing how me reading that info was like a flick of a light switch and to this guy it was complete drivel.

Yeah, where I live, sometimes there is already stress on the health system, so if we start losing doctors and nurses to the disease, it will take years to recover. These people aren't so easily replaced.

Here's a tip if you want to shut down a mid-tier conspiracy nut (not The Full Wellor mind you, but a person who claims the death toll is inflated due to counting anyone COVID-19 positive who dies as a COVID death): the state death reports are much, much higher than the decades worth of averages before. In fact, even if you subtract the state COVID deaths from the state death total, the numbers are still THOUSANDS higher than average. Thanks to the shelter-in-place laws and business shuttering, these numbers should actually be lower than average, but they're exactly the opposite.

The only way they could counter this is if they claim "well, states are lying about the deaths too" at which point you can just ignore the person because you're better off convincing a brick wall.

Epidemiologists and the public in Sweden in general has been antagonistic to the government for a good reason. This isn't just about the number of deaths that occurred, it's the speed at which it happened that ended up causing a lot of unnecessary deaths. We can't of course know that the strictest lockdowns are the most effective until the end of this pandemic, but it's highly doubtful Sweden will recover that well even in the future, whether stricter measures are imposed or not. The key to combating the virus was early action, and countries that reacted early and are planning to react early in the event of a second wave (like mine) are already carefully opening up.

I would say that the factor of domestic violence, eviction, suicides, etc. is indeed worth worrying about but a degree of suffering is unfortunately simply unavoidable. An epidemiologist from my country has already discussed this in great length 2 months ago just after the virus put Italy in quarantine. He concludes that suffering from the virus itself and suffering from the social effects of lockdown is something that has to be avoided as much as possible and recommended a balancing act in terms of measures, which, fortunately most central and eastern European countries enacted, in contrast to China's authoritarian resolutions and Sweden/UK/USA's complacency.

Good VOX video on why "reopening the country" willy nilly is a disastrous decision.

One month since Empyreal made this post and "President" Trump threatens to have protesters in Minneapolis fired upon.

Here in Germany we had some restrictions lifted, and now every day there's news about mass infections at church services. If you believe in God and want to ask him to help us through this difficult time, that's your choice, but if you do so at a church service you're actively sabotaging what you're asking of him.

That video of George Floyd is sickening. That city needed to burn. If people can't be humans there then the city needs to burn.

Not sure where you get the information that our public has been antagonistic towards the government. We've seen the opposite happen actually. The Social Democratic party which leads the government has strengthened its support considerably.

I still think we won't know which strategy has been the best until a few years down the line. And of course different strategies might work better or worse depending on the surrounding curcumstances as well. In the short run its obvious that our strategy has been worse - at least in regards to covid-19 related deaths. But we still don't know how the lockdown countries will do once the restictions are lifted. Or more so in the future with an expected covid-19 comeback. And of course we haven't taken the negative effects of being quarantined into question. Or the economy.

I just try to stay level headed and realize that there are no answers until years from now.

Numbers just seen randomly:

The USA has roughly four times the population of Germany.
In the USA roughly sixty times as many people lost their job during the Covid crisis as in Germany.

That part is not a conspiracy theory though. See this from the Ontario Ministry of Health website:
“5Deaths are determined by using the outcome field. Any case marked ‘Fatal’ is included in the deaths data. Deaths are included whether or not COVID-19 was determined to be a contributing or underlying cause of death as indicated in iPHIS or local case management systems.”
Found here, page 12 if you’d like to see for yourself - https://files.ontario.ca/moh-covid-19-r ... -31-en.pdf
That said, I don’t think that shows any intentionally deceptive inflation of the deaths totals. Yes it possibly means some of these people weren’t killed by COVID alone, but I agree with reporting them all, even if as maybe’s.

Some more numbers, less randomly (I went and compared some stats): Although the USA has roughly four times the population of Germany, it has roughly ten times as many confirmed Corona cases total and around twelve times as many Corona deaths right now. Unless something really unexpected happens, it's only going to get worse comparatively: the USA currently has around 123x the amount of active cases Germany has and about 25x the number of active cases considered serious or critical. Average new cases daily is about 66x higher in the USA than in Germany (calculated based upon the May 31st three-day moving average for both).

(And no, the difference can't remotely be explained through testing capacity. Although the USA *does* have a higher tests/1 mil population, the difference is nowhere near that big: ~54500 tests per 1M population for the USA versus ~47200 tests per 1M pop. for Germany.)

No, it is absolutely conspiracy theory. In order to be considered a "contributing factor," COVID's involvement needs to be significant, significant enough that the death would not occur at that time without the presence of the virus. That's not inflation.

And as I said. The death figures show that COVID is definitely being massively underreported.

As the lockdown is lifted / people start to get bored & entitled and ignore the lockdown, deaths in the UK start to plateau - interesting, maths reflecting idiocy.

The media is pre-occupied with the fact that people might not be able to have their cheap flyaway package holidays (following warnings that not allowing cheap flyaway package holidays will put cheap airlines out of business)

To paraphrase the government mantra - Spend Money ! Consume ! Save RyanAir !

Thing are getting interesting now. In Sweden we had the first sign that people in charge might think out strategy wasn't as good a they've said all along. It's not a 180 degree turn but it is remarkable after all this time. Unfortunately I don't think its the number of deaths that bothers them most but I think reality hit when they realized other countries are opening up but don't welcome Swedes to cross their border.

It will also be telling how the lockdown countries will do now when they start to open up. We might get a hint as to if locking down and then opening up was a good or a bad thing to do (even though the final verdict is of course years away).

So everything's back to normal.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to look back at this period and compare the different countries' strategies for keeping the spread low. AFAIK this is the first global pandemic since global communication really got going, so we have mountains of data for future researchers to look into when (if?) it's all over.

Nice, we get a VAT reduction for the second half of the year.

The British strategy seems to be based on where Boris's darts landed this morning.

The original plan to block all incoming travel was designed to except from France (which shares an effectively open border with the continent all the way to Turkey / Russia) - so not thought through at all, really.

The new plan is to let people come in via air, because God Save The Industry, and then quarantine them for two weeks - I can't see where the infrastructure exists for that, given that even on a very average day >600 aircraft arrive at the airport. Quarter this for COVID impact, and you're still looking at quarantining 150 plane-loads of people per day.

Must be great, being a politician & just being able to say what you like.

Just imagine how much less shitty it would be if Corbyn was at the wheel. Shit, UK would probably be in the top 5 lowest per capita deaths in the world. Fucking hell.

I can't see how he'd have done any better - the Labour groups running the Welsh response are doing just as bad a job as the main government. In their great wisdom, a 5 mile travel limit applies - this wisdom derives from Cardiff and it's urban sprawl - but also applies to the whole place, including those areas where the nearest built-up town is 10-30 miles away. The nearest (one shop, a church, a pub) village of 500+ people is three miles from my house in a straight line - by road it's 6 miles. Technically I'm not allowed to buy food !

They're all idiots - Corbyn would have stayed in his own (definitely not Tory) millionaire's enclave and done less in the 'shagging the PA' line, granted, but I can't see him being practically any better.

In fact, reading up on the whole stimulus package today, not a cent for large corporations and everything put into social spending for everyone. Our politicians must be on drugs, never in a million years I'd have expected something like that.

Just saw Cradle Of Filth are selling masks in their merch
Who run their merch? Gene Simmons?

Today the Brazilian government announced it'll no longer announce its death toll. That'll fix it.

If you don't count them, they aren't real - that's exactly how I deal with new problems at work on a Friday afternoon - that's someone's problem in the future a Monday

It's going to be a hell of a Monday for some countries - the R-rate in the UK is already ticking up, as people ignore the lockdown / join protest marches / get sent back to work because the government is more concerned with money as usual.

What's pissing me off right now is that many of my friends are in denial about the fact that not only has covid NOT gone anywhere, but it's gotten worse.

So the W.H.O. released ahead of time a statement that asymptomatic people are not very likely to pass on the disease, but what some of the articles have left out, and which info you can find in some of the longer articles from the same source, is that while this is true, at the same time PRE-symptomatic people within the first 3 days of catching covid pass on the virus to a whopping FOURTY PERCENT of those who eventually die, and yet they generally present as either very mild or nearly identical to asymptomatic cases!!

This info isn't being shown in every article, so people are thinking "ok, so everything is fine to open up again."

Meanwhile, cases are up in something close to 20 different states across the U.S., the overall numbers are higher than ever and will likely only get higher from all the people who have been out protesting.

People are just not getting that this shit hasn't gone anywhere, and that the pre-symptomatic people during the first 3 days or so seem like they aren't sick and are asymptomatic, yet those people are passing it on at exponential rates, even while asymptomatic spread is rare.

I think people just want to believe what they want to believe, but i don't see why believing that the virus is gone helps anyone when it continues to be just as dangerous as ever.

I'm pretty disgusted that some of my friends are so naive.

You're exactly right. The severity of the situation is judged on what is happening in real life, not on theoretical transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. The latter might influence the former, but we have direct evidence that the situation is nowhere near good.



I haven't followed the literature on COVID-19 in a while, but it looks like WHO is now having to make some clarifications on what they said. There is already good documentation that pre-symptomatic cases (and those early in the disease course) are contagious - they have higher viral RNA loads (acknowledging the limitations of quantitative RNA as a surrogate marker for presence of infectious virions), and their mild (or absent, for the presymptomatic pts) symptoms make them less likely to self-isolate.

On the other hand, we have studies in the literature that highlight transmission from asymptomatic cases. The rate is not incredibly high, but one Chinese cohort study of asymptomatic cases (that remained asymptomatic throughout the course of infection) showed 14.3% transmitted the virus to others. This number in itself does not necessarily represent the true infectivity of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases either, since it is possible some of these asymptomatic cases simply never came into contact with a well person. When the WHO said transmission was "rare", this seems discordant with the numbers we are looking at.

The terminology also appears different now. In the earlier studies on "asymptomatic" cases, this referred to the case being asymptomatic at the time of suspected transmission, but they would proceed to become symptomatic later on (i.e. what you have described as pre-symptomatic). Then there is the other group of people, who never have symptoms throughout their infection.

Congratulations to New Zealand, who has extirpated the virus! https://nationalpost.com/news/new-zeala ... 701645&amp

Meanwhile cases in Arizona, Texas, Florida and South Carolina have hit new post-Memorial day surging highs.

Especially Arizona. They're getting fucked.

On a positive note: Meat consumption has significantly reduced in the US, and now Dogs are being trained to be Covid detectors.