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Covid 48: The Long March


Darzin
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On 2/27/2023 at 8:19 AM, Tywin et al. said:

I wouldn't be too dismissive of the reports that it was a lab leak. There's conflicting evidence and no sensible person can believe the Chinese government. Frankly the entire world should have put a lot more pressure on them to be honest about what exactly happened. 

 

On 2/27/2023 at 10:03 AM, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I admit I am most curious about why the department of energy of all groups is doing any kind of analysis on this.

Personally, I think it's because they're another captive that's compelled to go along with the top down narrative.  If we end up provoking China I'd be shocked.  Also, squirrel!!!!

On 2/27/2023 at 2:48 PM, Padraig said:

Raja does seem to have read much more of the primary sources than anyone else here.  That's a strength.

I don't really have a strong opinion.  I do know that humans are very good at seeing patterns, even when they don't exist, so i'm a little cautious about blaming China for a supposed leak.  As Raja said, if the DoE has new evidence, publish it.

Lol.  DoE is even less reliably than my bowel cycle.  Some mornings I don't have to shit, but the government is constantly pushing out things that favor the government narrative.  My bum can't handle The Truth.

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23 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

 

Personally, I think it's because they're another captive that's compelled to go along with the top down narrative.  If we end up provoking China I'd be shocked.  Also, squirrel!!!!

Lol.  DoE is even less reliably than my bowel cycle.  Some mornings I don't have to shit, but the government is constantly pushing out things that favor the government narrative.  My bum can't handle The Truth.

You have been worrying me lately. 
 

Do you admit the moon landings aren’t fake?

That the Earth isn’t flat?

And 9/11 wasn’t an inside job?

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17 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Wow. Who would have thought that large scale population immunity might reduce the impact of Covid. What a turn up for the books.

Who would have thought  a few hundred years of evidence for vaccination working to gain immunity in a population would actually work. One for the books.

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8 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Who would have thought  a few hundred years of evidence for vaccination working to gain immunity in a population would actually work. One for the books.

Yes vaccination has contributed to population immunity. Good isn’t it. Maybe we can stop with the doomonger stories now.

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7 hours ago, maarsen said:

for the books.

And another for the books: fools remain fools continuing to propound -- and compound! -- their foolishness. :P

Like Josh Marshall said yesterday:

Quote

I was struck again by the basic fact: It is all but impossible to discuss the issue as a question of scientific investigation as opposed to a contest amongst — or between? with? — all the stresses and beliefs and collective wounds of the COVID pandemic era. Perhaps, put differently, the public conversation has almost no relation to the actual scientific inquiry.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/up-in-arms-in-and-in-our-faces

 

Edited by Zorral
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Yet people marvel that we still do our best to keep from contracting covid.  They go, "Who cares?  You get sick and then you get better.  Big deal."

Though we are taking chances now, while still trying to minimize risk.  Any more vaccines come on line, I'm there on line to get them.  I still mask. But best buddy, Partner and I just returned from the local, where we sat for about 40 minutes, maskless, and had a couple libations.  The place was empty though, except for us as customers and the staff, who were in the back doing the closing down things.

Still, at this time last year?  With the numbers we were having?  No way would any of we three have been there.

Edited by Zorral
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Ah fuck, it got me...

Friday two weeks ago I got a cold that struck me down the whole weekend. I wasn't able to work because of my massive headache I got along with it, so I tested myself, it was negative and went to the doctor to take the week off. This Monday I still had a bit of a scratchy throat, but was otherwise fine, so I went to work again. Until I somehow got struck down extremely badly yesterday with another massive headache, running nose and coughing. Then spent the whole night fighting that headache, shiver attacks and sweating like crazy. Since today was a very short day, I thought I could go to school, do my two lessons and go back home into bed... but on my way to school I felt extremely weak and wobbly and had quite some trouble putting one foot after another. It was so bad I had a nagging feeling, so first thing in the staff room, I did a Covid test.

Ah, fuck my life: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010246763023700129/1083738883692433538/20230310_123721.jpg

So now wobbled my way back home and went back to bed. Unfortunately my doctor's already closed, but I guess I can hand in my prescription on Monday. Fuck... Hope it doesn't do shit with my lung.

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Wearing a respirator is currently de jure illegal in Austria outside of medical settings and caretaking facilities unless you have doctors note.

It's because we have a law that forbids masking in public(from 2017 when we had a right/far right coalition government). The spirit of the law was to prosecute Muslims wearing veils obviously. 

To prevent legal challenges it is a broad law and with mask mandates gone it has actually been de jure illegal again in most places for a while now. Just made news because police tried to enforce it against a 87 year old woman wearing one. The health care minister said that masking is not illegal but until they actually change the law that is not really true.

It is a law that our far right police force likes I guess. No surprise there as they more or less supported people protesting against COVID mandate. Strangely enough they forgot their new approach to de-escalate at all costs when the climate protests started up again but remembered it again when people with Russian flags started to protest for peace.

However all people who have filed a complaint against being fined because of the law since 2017 have succeeded afaik because everyone involved expects that our constitutional court would declare the law invalid if a case ever got that far. Lol.

Edited by Luzifer's right hand
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On 3/15/2023 at 3:46 AM, Luzifer's right hand said:

Wearing a respirator is currently de jure illegal in Austria outside of medical settings and caretaking facilities unless you have doctors note.

It's because we have a law that forbids masking in public(from 2017 when we had a right/far right coalition government). The spirit of the law was to prosecute Muslims wearing veils obviously. 

To prevent legal challenges it is a broad law and with mask mandates gone it has actually been de jure illegal again in most places for a while now. Just made news because police tried to enforce it against a 87 year old woman wearing one. The health care minister said that masking is not illegal but until they actually change the law that is not really true.

It is a law that our far right police force likes I guess. No surprise there as they more or less supported people protesting against COVID mandate. Strangely enough they forgot their new approach to de-escalate at all costs when the climate protests started up again but remembered it again when people with Russian flags started to protest for peace.

However all people who have filed a complaint against being fined because of the law since 2017 have succeeded afaik because everyone involved expects that our constitutional court would declare the law invalid if a case ever got that far. Lol.

Does Austria not have cold weather? I thought it was a ski mecca?

I wear a facemask whenever i leave my home when it reaches 10°F and below, which happens virtually every winter in this region.

Imagine telling a ski lift operator or an ice fisherman a facemask is illegal. It sounds like insanity.

The type of nitwits that dreamed up those ban the veils (which had to be escalated to ban all masks, if i read you right) arent to adept at walking in others shoes im guessing (as if such a quality shouldnt be critical for a person in the position of lawmaker).

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8 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Does Austria not have cold weather? I thought it was a ski mecca?

I wear a facemask whenever i leave my home when it reaches 10°F and below, which happens virtually every winter in this region.

Imagine telling a ski lift operator or an ice fisherman a facemask is illegal. It sounds like insanity.

The type of nitwits that dreamed up those ban the veils (which had to be escalated to ban all masks, if i read you right) arent to adept at walking in others shoes im guessing (as if such a quality shouldnt be critical for a person in the position of lawmaker).

There are exceptions for scarfs when the weather is cold but the police has accosted people wearing them before.

It's up to the police to decide if it is cold enough. ;)

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The latest news on the origin of Covid seems to be that it came from infected raccoon dogs at the Wuhan live market. Raccoon dog DNA was found with the original version of the Covid virus in samples taken at the beginning of the pandemic at the market. Chinese authorities did shut down this exchange of information online but not before the data was released.

As to the why of the censorship, I assume that being associated with eating dogs is more problematic than being associated with incompetent lab techs.

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8 hours ago, maarsen said:

The latest news on the origin of Covid seems to be that it came from infected raccoon dogs at the Wuhan live market. Raccoon dog DNA was found with the original version of the Covid virus in samples taken at the beginning of the pandemic at the market. Chinese authorities did shut down this exchange of information online but not before the data was released.

As to the why of the censorship, I assume that being associated with eating dogs is more problematic than being associated with incompetent lab techs.

I've been holding off commenting on this as it looks to have come out as a leak after a WHO briefing by scientists with access to the data. The principle scientists involved aren't commenting yet and the data isn't available for public analysis, so imo the reporting is premature.

But at most this will simply localize raccoon dogs and SARS-CoV-2 virus to the markets at the start of the pandemic, rather than anything more definitive (note that we already knew this with very high certainty). It's another data point, but isn't a smoking gun. Will be interested to read the publication, though I'm no expert in meta-genomics so a lot will go over my head.

The CCP have been very keen to avoid any criticism / responsibility for the covid pandemic on any level. The 2003 SARS outbreak was strongly linked to the live animal trade and they were meant to have cracked down on it, so in many ways a repeat with none of the lessons learnt is worse than the alternatives.

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Yeah, I've also read the reporting but the pre-print/ paper been released yet so didn't put it in the thread yet.

The one part of the reporting I found interesting is that the fact that someone pulled the data after it was analyzed. All a bit sketchy.

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Studies show long COVID to be less frequent and of shorter duration than originally feared:

https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/long-covid-symptoms-studies-research-variant.html

Quote

Meanwhile, researchers at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx looked at 18,811 patients who’d tested positive for COVID-19 and 5,772 who’d had influenza. The number of patients reporting new-onset neuropsychiatric symptoms after COVID-19 was 388, or 2 percent. This figure was actually less than that for patients with influenza, which was 2.5 percent.

There’s another way to look at long COVID’s impact, and that’s by examining how it has affected the workforce. “The COVID-19 pandemic will almost certainly create a substantial wave of chronically disabled people,” Ed Yong wrote in 2020. Others argued that this surge of long-haul cases would not only mean enormous suffering but would actually pose a threat to economic recovery. “Long COVID is contributing to record high numbers of unfilled jobs by keeping millions of people from getting back to work,” a Brookings report suggested last year.

There is no evidence that any of this has actually happened. Not only did disability claims not rise during the pandemic, they fell. “You see absolutely no reaction at all to the COVID crisis,” Nicole Maestas, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard, told Benjamin Mazer of the Atlantic in June 2022. “It’s just not a mass disabling event.”

Quote

Another insight that emerges from the cohort studies into long COVID is that it’s not so easy to prove causality between a particular infection and a symptom. Almost all the symptoms associated with long COVID can also be triggered by all sorts of things, from other viruses to even the basic reality of living through a pandemic. Fatigue, for instance, can be caused by COVID-19—or by stress, depression, sleep disorders, anemia, and cancer, among other things. So, even though many patients insist that they are COVID long-haulers—and their symptoms align entirely with the common understanding of the condition—it’s entirely possible that they’re dealing with something slightly different from long COVID. Data from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics released in January, collected in 20-minute online surveys, shows that 11 percent of American adults who have had COVID say they are currently experiencing lingering symptoms. But this self-reported information has not been borne out by more rigorously collected data. In the absence of any test for the disease, there is no way to definitively say that their symptoms are actually directly caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

 

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So looks like the preliminary report on the market swabs has been released. Haven't had time to read it properly, but from the abstract:

Quote

Our analysis of these data found that genetic evidence of multiple animal species was present in locations of the market where SARS-CoV-2 positive environmental samples had been collected. This includes raccoon dogs, which are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and shed sufficient virus to transmit to other species. However, this also included other mammalian species that require consideration as possible intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2.

Although live mammals had previously been observed at Huanan market in late 2019, their exact locations were not conclusively known, and some of the animal species we identify in the report below were not included in the list of live or dead animals tested at the Huanan market, as reported in the 2021 WHO-China joint report on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that they were present. In some cases, the amount of animal genetic material was greater than the amount of human genetic material, consistent with the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in these samples being due to animal infections.

 

4 hours ago, Raja said:

The one part of the reporting I found interesting is that the fact that someone pulled the data after it was analyzed. All a bit sketchy.

That's also addressed in the report:

Quote

We contacted an author of the Gao et al. preprint on 9 March 2023 to inquire about the data, and were told that we could conduct an independent analysis. On 10 March we advised the same author that we had discovered the presence of animal genetic material in the samples. On 11 March 2023, we discovered that the data had been made unavailable (at the request of the submitter according to a statement on GISAID). On the same day we contacted both the corresponding author of the preprint as well as the author who had contributed the raw data to GISAID and asked if they would like to collaborate with us on analyses of these data. On 13 March 2023, those of us who had either downloaded the data, or associated metadata, or contacted the corresponding author of the preprint, received emails from the GISAID Secretariat admonishing us to comply with the GISAID terms of use , or in some cases falsely accusing us of having breached the GISAID terms of use. We are well aware of these terms of use, have not breached them, and have no intention of breaching them.

EDIT: whoops, forgot to include a link: https://zenodo.org/record/7754299#.ZBkq7nZByUk

Edited by Impmk2
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7 hours ago, Gorn said:

long COVID to be less frequent and of shorter duration than originally feared

For those who contracted covid of the omicron varieties, after the vaccines were available, who did not suffer other morbidities.  Which is why this is good news, despite the very much about covid we still don't know.

There are millions globally suffering long covid who contracted the first varieties, prior to vaccines, and who also suffer morbidities.

 

Edited by Zorral
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