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COVID-19 #13 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Disease


Mr. Chatywin et al.

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14 hours ago, Prue said:

Interesting, that seems to be what is done in Germany now that R was below 1. Restrictions are reduced, but with the failsafe that regions have to go into lockdown again if there are more than 50 new covid19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. That was reached immediately in a rural area where more than 100 workers in a meat processing plant were infected. So they didn't get out of lockdown at all in that area.

What is up with slaughterhouses and meat processing plants? There are reports from the US that a large number of workers are also infected. As far as I understand they always wear PPE during their work shifts.

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1 hour ago, rotting sea cow said:

What is up with slaughterhouses and meat processing plants? There are reports from the US that a large number of workers are also infected. As far as I understand they always wear PPE during their work shifts.

PPE needs competent handling or it won't do any good. The problem with viruses and bacteria is that the gear gets contaminated. You need to be careful when you take it off and it shouldn't be reused unless there is a way to safely sanitise it. When even hospitals struggle with their hygiene, my faith in slaughterhouses is limited. 

As far as the German slaughterhouses are concerned, they hire a lot of migrant workers from eastern Europe and the Balkans, who live in rather poor housing conditions. 

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4 minutes ago, Loge said:

PPE needs competent handling or it won't do any good. The problem with viruses and bacteria is that the gear gets contaminated. You need to be careful when you take it off and it shouldn't be reused unless there is a way to safely sanitise it. When even hospitals struggle with their hygiene, my faith in slaughterhouses is limited. 

As far as the German slaughterhouses are concerned, they hire a lot of migrant workers from eastern Europe and the Balkans, who live in rather poor housing conditions. 

Ok. This explains a lot the issue. What about the meat? Is it getting contaminated?

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3 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Ok. This explains a lot the issue. What about the meat? Is it getting contaminated?

Probably yes. Fortunately, the virus doesn't survive cooking. You have to be careful handling it, though.

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19 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

Actually, that seems like it could be a great way to get these young minds to THINK.  Not in the way of pushing a particular idea or viewpoint, but getting them to come up with their own ways of resolving that conflict between getting people back to work vs. slowing the spread of disease.  IOW, rather than teaching them WHAT to think, teach them HOW to think.

TTYL.  I'm on my way to my husband's first chemo treatment.

Yeah, thinking... given the students I have right now, I was thinking that it would be better to start by introducing them to the concept that such a thing like astroturfing exists as a standalone lesson. The trouble with having them try to come up with arguments is that I have been training that for the last few weeks with rather low success due to the fact that most of them are barely literate. I'm just doing the bare basics.

Also: Having crossed my fingers that everything goes alright. You guys can power through this!

13 hours ago, felice said:

Isn't astroturfing essentially manufacturing an artificial conflict, which has unique considerations for solving compared to other types of conflict? It applies on a one-to-one level too; a student could easily get into a conflict with a victim of astroturfing, and needs to be able to recognise and handle that situation. And if the student has themself been taken in by astroturfing, a discussion of the topic might help them recognise it, even if that possibility isn't directly addressed.

Yeah, I agree that it does kinda fits the overall topic. Unfortunately last week I had them research about "Coronabonds" and what that whole hassle was about, so dropping that for such a drastic swerve would have been bad. Therefore I focused on finishing the Coronabonds stuff with a lesson there so that I can go can go to fake grassroots campaigns afterwards. I guess the tinfoil army won't go away till next week anyway...

Also with that specific class I must admit that I suspect the latter. There are at least two students who keep throwing around conspiracy theories in their class What's App group and just before the school closing I had to sacrifice a whole lesson just to discuss and debunk those. At least one of these students I judge that if she gets out of that lesson that in her endeavour to engage with conspiracy theories she got tricked by an actual one, she will become more critical in her thinking. Unfortunately the other one already boldly stated that he doesn't care if his sources have an agenda because all sources do.

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On 5/11/2020 at 6:06 AM, Loge said:

The AfD or parts of it  are trying to capitalise on discontent with the lockdown, as does the FDP. Opinion polls show a decline of these parties, however. Same with the Greens, who have a lot of anti-vaxxers in heir voter base. Media coverage of the anti-lockdown protests has been rather slow. The gist of it is essentially that the protesters are a haphazard coalition of the discontent. 

Thanks for the response, I really hope those groups are running into a wall in their attempts to exploit this and continue dwindling.

21 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

TTYL.  I'm on my way to my husband's first chemo treatment.

Best of luck with the chemo, Tears. As said, this is a heck of a time to be starting it, and it'll be a trial, but I'll be wishing th best for you and hubby that you pull through it.

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On 5/11/2020 at 11:29 AM, Fragile Bird said:

China reported 17 new cases today. 10 cases were brought in by people returning from overseas. But. There were 5 new cases in Wuhan, the first cases since early April. If those cases were brought in by people who travelled outside of Wuhan, that's one thing, but if the people have no links to travellers, where the heck did the virus come from?

Well, the Chinese want to know that too, it seems. They want to test the entire population of Wuhan. Eleven million of people. 

I don't know what to make out of this

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1 minute ago, rotting sea cow said:

Well, the Chinese want to know that too, it seems. They want to test the entire population of Wuhan. Eleven million of people. 

I don't know what to make out of this

The Internet is screaming "The Chinese are lying, nobody tests 11 M people for 6 cases, it must be 6,000 cases, it must be 60,000 cases!"

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Just now, Fragile Bird said:

The Internet is screaming "The Chinese are lying, nobody tests 11 M people for 6 cases, it must be 6,000 cases, it must be 60,000 cases!"

They might even right. The Chinese want to know that too. It might well possible there is - again - a silent outbreak ongoing.

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10 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

The Internet is screaming "The Chinese are lying, nobody tests 11 M people for 6 cases, it must be 6,000 cases, it must be 60,000 cases!"

While it does sound like an intimidating logistical challenge there are several countries which have tested more than 10% of their population, 11 million tests in China would be less than 1% of their total population - although they do seem to be intending to do it in a shorter time period which would increase the difficulty.

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A little update on Sweden. First, today they released some information regarding a sampling of people in week 17 (specifically form April 21 to April 24th) across the country, and found 0.9% returned as having active infections.  The subsection for Stockholm County, a quarter of the tests, showed 2.3% active infection at that time. During week 14, testing in Stockholm showed 2.5% with active infections.

This survey will be repeated every few weeks to show development over time.

Next week they will present results of antibody testing from, I think. week 17 as well,  but that'll capture the picture of the situation 2-3 weeks earlier as I understand it.

In a different vein, Joakim Rocklöv -- one of the more trenchant critics of FHM's approach for a time, and still a bit skeptical but he has recently distanced himself from a group of much more outspoken detractors who repeatedly shot their credibility to shreds with bad modelling and decidedly uncivil language (calling FHM's modellers 'untalented') -- has revised a paper that in its earlier version from early April painted a very negative picture of the situation in Sweden, and presently he finds that Sweden's efforts were largely successful to its stated goals (he doesn'tcome out and say it but he essentially indicates that their 'simple' models were more correct than his own), and were much more effective in reducing R than he gave it credit for. However, he also proposes that with a 10% improvement in effective infectious period (from an average of 3.3 days to 3 days -- this is more a mathematical construct than representing actual infectiousness for any one individual) that he thinks deaths could be nearly halved by September 1st and some 1.5 million fewer people would be infected. The paper lays out all the math for those interested in epidemiological models.

 

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1 minute ago, Fragile Bird said:

I’m sorry, I’m being a bit thick, what does this mean?

If I'm following it right it would mean that if they're doing 20k tests for active virus and 80k for antibodies they are reporting their total tests as 100k even though 80% of those tests can't identify active cases. So their active infections number will be artificially suppressed while their recovered number would look higher.

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On 5/11/2020 at 7:29 PM, Fragile Bird said:

 

China reported 17 new cases today. 10 cases were brought in by people returning from overseas. But. There were 5 new cases in Wuhan, the first cases since early April. If those cases were brought in by people who travelled outside of Wuhan, that's one thing, but if the people have no links to travellers, where the heck did the virus come from?

 

I presume the virus could lurk around in minor chains of infection that don't become obvious until someone goes to hospital. People can have it and recover or have it and die with no record of having it, meanwhile having passed it on, maybe not to enough people to make an observable cluster. Or as you say, from outside Wuhan.

 

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9 minutes ago, Castellan said:

I presume the virus could lurk around in minor chains of infection that don't become obvious until someone goes to hospital. People can have it and recover or have it and die with no record of having it, meanwhile having passed it on, maybe not to enough people to make an observable cluster. Or as you say, from outside Wuhan.

I don't think there's anything surprising in this happening, it would possibly have been more unlikely that they had managed to completely eradicate the virus in Wuhan.

Viruses tend to be tricky to completely stamp out, I remember reading recently about the current ebola outbreak in the Congo that they were one day away from declaring it as officially over because it had been many weeks since the last case and then they found a new case.

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16 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

Ok. This explains a lot the issue. What about the meat? Is it getting contaminated?

I've also read that since meat packing plants are mostly refrigerated, the virus can survive longer.  As well, I'd assume the ventilation systems are even more closed than in typical buildings to keep them more energy efficient.  But that latter is purely my speculation.

Best practice is to marinate your steak in clorox though.  ;)

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Not sure if it's been brought up before but - here's an article on the possibility of SARS-CoV2 persistence in the semen of recovering patients. There's reference to one study which indicates this, and a coulple with opposing results. 

Before anyone asks, here's how the first study got their info (not explicably, but you get the picture).

Quote

Among 50 patients identified, 12 patients were unable to provide a semen specimen because of erectile dysfunction, being in a comatose state, or dying prior to recruitment; therefore, a total of 38 patients were enrolled for semen testing. Of these 38 participants who provided a semen specimen, 23 participants (60.5%) had achieved clinical recovery and 15 participants (39.5%) were at the acute stage of infection.

It brings to the fore immunopriviledged sites.

Immune priviledged sites are fascinating. They include the Eyes, Brain, Pacenta and Fetus, Testes and Central Nervous System. Basically, these are the diplomatic immunity zones where the local immunity police cannot go. They are foreign turf. 

Unfortunately viruses have figured out they can harbour in these sites when the going gets tough for them outside the sites. And by harbour it is suggested they cannot replicate here, but may persist. This has been shown with Zika, HIV and Ebola. And now possibly SARS-CoV2. The fuckers!
 

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10 hours ago, williamjm said:

While it does sound like an intimidating logistical challenge there are several countries which have tested more than 10% of their population, 11 million tests in China would be less than 1% of their total population - although they do seem to be intending to do it in a shorter time period which would increase the difficulty.

Apparently they are not going to individually test everyone. Internet wisdom suggest they are going to make chunks of people, mix the samples and test them together. If tests come back negative these groups are fine. If tests come back positive, test them again individually.  That way they need far less tests than the population and can be done much faster. The idea is to do everything within a week or two.

BTW. It is suggested that Germany and Russia are doing exactly that, which explain the huge number of testing they are doing.

 

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