Covid-19 #21 - The Darkness Before the Dawn

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

3 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

It was incredibly complicated. A visa wasn’t needed, NAFTA permits people in certain occupations the ability to work in US-Canada-Mexico without a “labor market impact study” or “show me how you tried and failed to hire a citizen for this job” (basically, it is assumed in law that one’s specialized knowledge is so rare that one is not stealing a job from a citizen)

I know it. Also, there's no limit on how many times an individual can be issued a TN. The downside is that a TN is specifically not a path to permanent residence, if that's your goal.

If your job fits one of the professional categories and you meet the requirements, just show up at the border with your paperwork and fifty-six American moneys and they process you right there. If you remember to focus on respectful, monosyllabic answers and you don't screw it up too bad, you're in. I've had the process literally take 10 minutes.

I've also had it take an hour and a half. For no damn reason at all. 

3 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

In northern Labrador, the local administrative office was on a mining site, but I did not need more than the Company’s general safety video and stern warnings to be escorted at all times to enter the premises. I did much prefer the HQ in Montréal.

You don't say?

[DireWolfSpirit]

5 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

 

@DireWolfSpirit - did you put the park bench back, eventually, and make it a mystery? I’m curious as to the ultimate fate of this park bench, here.

Can't recall, may be still in that backyard, I sold that house quite awhile ago now.

This particular city would go full Nazi with ugly letters over the smallest amounts. Thing was, H&R Block was able to show I didn't even owe them what they claimed.

No love lost for their tactics.

[Raja]

4 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

@rotting sea cow

New Zealand's performance on this has been outstanding, and no doubt Germany, along with almost every other western country, was lazy with their initial respose

Categorizing Germany's response to the rest of the European Union is incorrect. Look at the excess deaths chart here; Germany is at 4% excess deaths, compare that to the other European countries ( UK 18%, France 11%, Spain 24%, Sweden, 12%, Italy 15%, Belgium 26%).

( I find this comparing Merkel vs Ardern thing a little odd, tbh. They've both done an excellent job)

Denmark, S.Korea, Norway have also done well when we look at excess deaths.

New Zealand deserves a lot of credit for their response though, I certainly agree with that.

[Zorral]

5 hours ago, Mudguard said:

While the new strain might be more infectious, I wouldn't put much stock into this paper at this time.  First, the paper hasn't been peer reviewed yet.  Second, many of the coronavirus models have been garbage.  They aren't very useful beyond predicting what will happen over the next few weeks, and even then they aren't great at accounting for the efficacy of an invention or super spreading events.  Just way too much uncertainty and variability to account for in their models.  

Over reliance on models have allowed governments to do really stupid things, like Sweden relying on modeling to claim that they were near herd immunity and that they wouldn't have a second wave.  

Also, there's not much that can be done to contain it.  I'm sure it's already spread all over the world by now, including into the US. 

New strains and variants have been popping up throughout the pandemic, and it's reassuring to me that the vaccines, which were developed based on the original strain, are still extremely effective after 9 months.  It suggests that the vaccines are likely to work against the new strain.  

It's going to be a bad winter, but I think we'll be largely past it by the summer.

I do believe the section of the article I quoted did say all, or least most of that? particularly saying it hadn't been peer reviewed . . . .  <no emoji for wine drinking, but I am doing that ttoo; and listening to Puerto Rican Christmas music and smelling dinner in the making.>

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

2 hours ago, Raja said:

Categorizing Germany's response to the rest of the European Union is incorrect. Look at the excess deaths chart here; Germany is at 4% excess deaths, compare that to the other European countries ( UK 18%, France 11%, Spain 24%, Sweden, 12%, Italy 15%, Belgium 26%).

( I find this comparing Merkel vs Ardern thing a little odd, tbh. They've both done an excellent job)

Denmark, S.Korea, Norway have also done well when we look at excess deaths.

New Zealand deserves a lot of credit for their response though, I certainly agree with that.

You're not wrong.  Wouldn't suggest Germany didn't do a good job on this, but the initial response, insofar as the typical western country is concerned, was a bit lax if the public evidence is anything to go by. But hindsight is 20/20.

I certainly remember Trump (ever the optimist) making the comment (March, I think) where he cited "100K-200K deaths" as being a success for his administration. That seems quaint now but at the time, I thought it was pretty outrageous to predict such a high number and call it a "good job". This is also around the time that idiotic meme was going around criticizing the media for not similarly freaking out over Obama's H1N1 deaths.

I can also remember back in late February or March, seeing a story about  Prince Edward Island (a Canadian maritime province) locking down and instituting substantial fines for violations. Something like $500 for a first offense and $1000 for a second. No other Canadian Province had done this yet to my knowledge. This was back in the spring, around the time my school cancelled in-person classes; about a week or two before those idiot college kids were on spring break in Florida, disgracing themselves on the news.

I would imagine the Premier of PEI, seeing the situation to the south and to the west, decided to have a province-wide inventory of ICU beds and ventilators done. After recieving the answer, they didn't wait. 

[Raja]

49 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

You're not wrong.  Wouldn't suggest Germany didn't do a good job on this, but the initial response, insofar as the typical western country is concerned, was a bit lax if the public evidence is anything to go by. But hindsight is 20/20.

My default starting position for the pandemic response is 1. We've never seen anything like it  2. Leaders are bound to make some mistakes because of point number 1, but it's their response thereafter that we should evaluate them by, it's why I am willing to forgive initial missteps, but not repeated ones ( Like the ones the governments in the US and UK are *still* making, I use those two examples as those are the ones I'm most familiar with)

I keep going back to this clip on March 13th, by Mike Ryan from the WHO which I think I've posted before, almost every word of this is true, especially his point on community acceptance, schools and the economy. His point about paralysis because of fear of failure and this paralysis being the greatest error in pandemic response rings completely true for the govt response we've had in the UK.

 

[rotting sea cow]

13 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

A colleague of mine was chatting to the genomics guy who runs a lot of the sequencing here in South Aus a while back - we were looking to get some of our historical wastewater samples run. He was saying they try to run WGS on pretty much every positive sample. Just the weaker positives (> ct 30) they struggle to get decent reads from.

These are results I'd really like to see. We have been getting all these reports of positive wastewater samples before the official timeline, but so far it's not clear what they are detecting. We need these sequences results.

[Impmk2]

11 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

These are results I'd really like to see. We have been getting all these reports of positive wastewater samples before the official timeline, but so far it's not clear what they are detecting. We need these sequences results.

Unfortunately here all our wastewater positives here were getting close to the limit of detection - a very weak signal. Couldn't do much more than sanger sequence the amplicons generated to 100% confirm it was covid for publication purposes, but wasn't able to run whole genome sequencing which was a real pity.

[Fragile Bird]

The new Covid variant has been reported in 13 countries now, mostly in Europe but also in Japan and Lebanon.

[Fragile Bird]

That didn’t take long. Two cases of the new variant found in Ontario.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I may have misunderstood but it looked like worldometer posted something about not having full reporting numbers during the holidays and the numbers will look a little lower for a week or so but its likely going to be due to underreporting, not an improvement in the actual virus levels.

[A True Kaniggit]

7 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I may have misunderstood but it looked like worldometer posted something about not having full reporting numbers during the holidays and the numbers will look a little lower for a week or so but its likely going to be due to underreporting, not an improvement in the actual virus levels.

You are correct. The same thing happened for Thanksgiving. 
 

My coworker’s daughter got hospitalized. I hope she has good news to tell me Tuesday. 

[A True Kaniggit]

Pfft. My older brother still hasn’t had a negative test. But he was told he HAD to be back at work Monday. He works for the local sheriffs department. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Pfft. My older brother still hasn’t had a negative test. But he was told he HAD to be back at work Monday. He works for the local sheriffs department. 

Your brother has Covid and they're making him go back to work?

[A True Kaniggit]

6 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Your brother has Covid and they're making him go back to work?

Correct. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

@A True Kaniggit

That is so very messed up.

[Fragile Bird]

In some good news, surveys show the number of Americans willing to get vaccinated is increasing, something credited to media showing scenes of people getting the vaccine jab.

Quote

With the trucks rolling and the first government-authorized coronavirus vaccine making its way to all 50 states, a strong majority of Americans are inclined to get the vaccine but are divided over exactly when, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Monday finds.

More than eight in 10 Americans say they would receive the vaccine, with 40% saying they would take it as soon as it's available to them and 44% saying they would wait a bit before getting it.

Only 15% said they would refuse the vaccine entirely in the new survey, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' Knowledge Panel -- a reflection of growing confidence in the rapidly-developed vaccine, which marks a long-awaited turning point amid an unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-receive-covid-19-vaccine-divided-timing-poll/story?id=74703426

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

...refused vacation of more than five consecutive days, and made people go on short term disability if they needed to be out for a medical reason for more than five days.

I truly hated those people. I was only able to take 7 days total to recover from a total hysterectomy because of them. Short-term disability only pays out at 75% of salary and I was in the middle of a divorce, so I needed the money. 

How the hell can they even do that? Was Short term disability covered by an insurance carrier or the state? One well placed anonymous phone call could end that craziness.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

In some good news, surveys show the number of Americans willing to get vaccinated is increasing, something credited to media showing scenes of people getting the vaccine jab.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-receive-covid-19-vaccine-divided-timing-poll/story?id=74703426

All good news. Unfortunately it's the 20% that are total idiots who will screw it up for everyone else in the near term.

[HexMachina]

8 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

It is. Has it been at least 10 days since the first positive test? It could be just stray RNA, and not an active infection at over 10-14 days, right?

Can he talk to HR?

The cold storage company that I once worked for (bunch of assholes, also famous for a couple people who worked for them getting sick in NZ with the virus after it was supposed to be gone from NZ) refused vacation of more than five consecutive days, and made people go on short term disability if they needed to be out for a medical reason for more than five days.

I truly hated those people. I was only able to take 7 days total to recover from a total hysterectomy because of them. Short-term disability only pays out at 75% of salary and I was in the middle of a divorce, so I needed the money. 

 

3 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

How the hell can they even do that? Was Short term disability covered by an insurance carrier or the state? One well placed anonymous phone call could end that craziness.

U.S labour/employment law is really something else. The U.K has some questionable elements but the U.S is just bonkerballs non-existent or pro-business anti-worker