Covid19

[Mark W]

3 hours ago, MadManMike said:

I've had flu 3 or 4 times in my life, so the theory that you're immune after one go doesn't stack up... You'd be immune to that strain I guess.

Seemingly when viruses mutate they generally become less deadly, weirdly.  Guess for a virus to exist it needs a host that's alive, so dead hosts = bad times...

Turns out I was potentially right about the self employment payments for anyone who's looking at getting on board.  It's judged over tax returns from 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19, with an average profit from those years being used to create a monthly average.  You'll then be able to receive a 3 month lump sum.  If you were only self employed for part of that year, that will be divided by 12 rather than by the actual amount of months you were self employed for, so you do lose out on that.  You can claim it if you're self employed regardless of whether you need to due to your current financial situation or not, unlike the full time employee schemes where you have to be furloughed.

Spoke to my brother in NZ the other day, and their response is markedly different to ours.  4 different levels of threat, with corresponding actions.  They're at Level 4 now, which is the equivalent of where we're at.  There's clear metrics for it to go down to Level 3, so people know what the deal is with it rather than it just being vague 'guidelines' that we have here.  The way their payment system over there works out way better than ours too.  Everyone in comparative levels of employment gets the same amount (so full time is $X, part time is $Y).  They introduced the scheme on Monday (I believe last week), and by Wednesday had paid $2.8bn to those who needed it.  Their reasoning is that having the money being available for when they need it now is the most important thing, and they can go back and track down anyone who had it illegitimately afterwards.  

Smaller population so it's easier obviously, but the different leadership style is so different...

[stalled]

I am no virologist but the influenzaviruses are not of the same family as coronaviruses, they do have the same RNA ancestry because both families have genetic material on their composition though. Wikipedia rules.

Regarding immunity, as you guys said, its always temporary, no one stays permanently immune due to natural mutations that also originate different strains, that is the reason why the seasonal flu is a billion dollar market for the labs that release and sell the vaccine every so often, it's a never ending cycle I am afraid.

Also, as @MadManMike stated, it is no probable that next year we get an exponential effect like this year but unfortunately we are still a very long time away from that and right now China is already bracing for a new wave and that can happen to any country with huge population numbers and/or territory, a new focus of infection can break again somewhere else.

[JT!]

26 minutes ago, Mark W said:

1-3% mortality rate? Can't be right, we're not going to loose that many people.

18 minutes ago, stalled said:

I am no virologist but the influenzaviruses are not of the same family as coronaviruses, they do have the same RNA ancestry because both families have genetic material on their composition though. Wikipedia rules.

Regarding immunity, as you guys said, its always temporary, no one stays permanently immune due to natural mutations that also originate different strains, that is the reason why the seasonal flu is a billion dollar market for the labs that release and sell the vaccine every so often, it's a never ending cycle I am afraid.

Also, as @MadManMike stated, it is no probable that next year we get an exponential effect like this year but unfortunately we are still a very long time away from that and right now China is already bracing for a new wave and that can happen to any country with huge population numbers and/or territory, a new focus of infection can break again somewhere else.

So I should really think of covid-19 and it's annual mutations to be something that's just "around" from now on? Like the flu and common colds?

 

[stalled]

46 minutes ago, JT! said:

1-3% mortality rate? Can't be right, we're not going to loose that many people.

So I should really think of covid-19 and it's annual mutations to be something that's just "around" from now on? Like the flu and common colds?

 

I have read that somewhere, yes, but I have not enough scientific knowledge of how a virus spreads and manages to remain in the community in order to tell you if that is what is going to happen.

Coronaviruses existed for a very long time before they manage to make the jump into human organisms, they are wild viruses natural to... wild animals. As far as I know, neither the other coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, reappeared so far unless we really look at this one as what it really seems to considered, a new strain of the original SARS which outbroke in China back in 2002. MERS outbreaks were registered in 2015 and 2018. 

I would say that the recent history shows that it is most likely that these types of viruses are not seasonal, outbreaks occur, for all we know some may not even have been recognized as such, but there is no annual or any other pattern, it just seems to start the same way, a human organism gets into contact with an infected animal.

Edited March 30, 2020 by stalled

[MadManMike]

Mark, you missed the point where I said I wasn't directly comparing it to flu... I'm aware it's not like it, I've had it and it's nothing like flu. The only comparison I made is that I believe it'll come back again, but probably not as bad as we'll have some immunity / resistance to it.

I also don't think we can share percentages at this stage. I've seen all kinds of numbers, but they're all based on the number of cases. The number of cases is not accurate because a tiny percentage of people have had testing. Since I went public with mine last week, lots of friends messaged me to say they'd had it but didn't want to tell people... Of course, none of us can be 100% sure we've had it until there's a test, but the point is that if you have 10,000 confirmed cases, you could have 250,000 that went untested, or even more. Therefore any death percentage will be far from accurate.

Once they get the testing out to everyone, or at least to a massive percentage of the country, I think we'll see numbers that are far lower than 3%.

Still, regardless of percentage, it's going to be a massive number and I'm not trying to downplay the severity. Estimates seem to be creeping down thankfully, so hopefully it'll be much lower than the experts first feared.

[monkeyseemonkeydo]

To be honest I'm pretty 'meh' about the whole thing again. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

 

[stalled]

1 hour ago, monkeyseemonkeydo said:

To be honest I'm pretty 'meh' about the whole thing again. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

 

It is almost certain now that Italy is victim of a very, very late identification of the first cases inside their borders. It's a fact that even after the lockdown of Lombardia many people arrived and left the area until authorities started noticing. This is just disastrous in a context where a highly contagious virus is roaming in the population.

They are not exactly to be faulted because when the first case is identified, even if early on, who knows how many people came into contact with that person? Dozens? With an incubation of one to two weeks, many times without symptoms, we can't even imagine how difficult it is to stop the spread.

What the numbers give us is something objective to hold on, to understand why it is so bad or where we are headed day after day if a nation manages to obtain a fixed minimum number of tests on the population. But that is what they reflect, of the tested people, how many were positive. Period.

All countries are probably in the so-called "mitigation phase" much earlier than they expected, meaning, community transmission started much earlier and when this is the case no one knows where it started and how it's spreading because it popped up somewhere that wasn't even in the vicinity of the transmission chains known by that time.

In my opinion it is not even relevant how high is the death rate, what matters is that be it 0.6% or 3%, at the end of the epidemic this will mean that many, many people will have perished, and many of those will not be old people with previous hart disease or diabetes, it will be healthy guys too, some in their 20's and 30's that somehow, either because the treatment they did home as advised by the health authorities, did not helped their bodies enough in fighting the causes of the symptoms, or because they did not follow the indications correctly or simply because they waited too long before heading to an hospital.

Just as @MadManMike wisely said, not even China knows for sure, not even close, this week they handled north of 40.000 urns to deceased victims relatives's, the official government numbers were less than 5.000 so they either have no clue at all, were incapable of testing rapid enough, tested very few people or are plain and simple ignoring the truth in order to shield themselves from other countries wrath when they realize China failed to really contain the epidemic and still chose to downplay it.

As someone said, there will be a world before this pandemic, and a world after the pandemic. Let's just see what that means really.

Edited March 30, 2020 by stalled

[Rusevelt]

WTF!https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sORFv_1585596844

Had to do the double take on the hands

[Jolfa]

On 01/04/2020 at 10:22 AM, Rusevelt said:

WTF!https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sORFv_1585596844

Had to do the double take on the hands

And reach the conclusion that they're silicone I hope? 

[JT!]

Schools are pretty much predicted to be done with for the school year here.

We're still under a non enforced stay at home order. However a lot of stores are stepping up now. Walmart will be temperature testing all employees, and I've heard my old place of work which is a hardware store will be testing the temps of customers too and have banned under 16 year olds.

I think the issue we're having here is that people are taking the whole family out shopping rather than just 1 person going, things like that.

I was talking to my father in law this morning because he'd called my wife to see if she wanted to be picked up and go to get something to eat and she said no because of the stay at home order. So he called me to ask about that, he didn't really seem to get the severity of it and didn't understand why he couldn't even come over to ours. He's also been wandering around stores and clothes shopping just for something to do.

So there is really a long way to go with educating people with things like not visiting family and going to shops for essentials only etc.

[Davetrials]

Well boredom has gotten the better of me and I've decided to buy another bike.

This whole lockdown thing is certainly costing me some money

[Little Yoshi]

1 hour ago, Davetrials said:

Well boredom has gotten the better of me and I've decided to buy another bike.

This whole lockdown thing is certainly costing me some money

Tarty is getting checked pretty much every hour now....its only a matter of time...

[Topsy]

3 hours ago, Davetrials said:

Well boredom has gotten the better of me and I've decided to buy another bike.

This whole lockdown thing is certainly costing me some money

I think it's costing me about £150 a week.. 

Managed not to pull the trigger on a mountain bike yet, simply because I'm not sure if I can get through all my current projects before the lockdown is over over here.

People are getting impatient and thinking we should be let out again, but the amount of people currently tested positive daily over here only means that it's stable, not under control.. It's not helping that 90% of the days have been sunshine and loads of people are out, but at least most seem to be keeping their distance. Still, until there's so few cases that one can again start checking where they contracted and who they've met etc. the lockdown technically shouldn't end. ..

It seems to be getting more people back onto TF though! 

Edited April 4, 2020 by Topsy

[Rusevelt]

When the weather hasn't been this nice in a long time, it's pretty damn hard to discipline yourself to avoid social distancing. And when you don't see the reality of the outbreak within your own community, that's even harder to follow social distancing.

Maybe the UK needs to go through the anguish a huge spike or peak period of deaths before people take notice and take precautions.

[forteh]

Well most of our staff have been furloughed, 4 of us left to work full time and keep the company afloat.  I'm doing 100% of the design and drawings for about 1.5millions worth of work over the next couple of weeks.  Doing it all from home but might need to go out to site a couple of times to do surveys.  Would be nice to be able to stay home and work on the van conversion more but on the other hand I'm still on full pay

Persephone is 5 on tuesday, today I taught her how to use an electric drill to screw screws, maybe next week I'll get her on the chopsaw

[Rusevelt]

So much for staying at home and social distancing. Or maybe taking the opportunity to get a healthy dose of vitamin D for their immune system. 

Guess these people would rather enjoy the freedom of outdoors and potential die later on than being couped up indoors going stir crazy to survive.

These scenes taken from Richmond/London.

 

Edited April 6, 2020 by Rusevelt

[marg26]

Would rather watch paint dry. Or a trials bike video, got any of them?

 

[MadManMike]

12 hours ago, marg26 said:

Would rather watch paint dry. Or a trials bike video, got any of them?

 

You are in a topic specifically on this subject though

So, who else is looking forward to total lockdown?

[marg26]

25 minutes ago, MadManMike said:

You are in a topic specifically on this subject though

So, who else is looking forward to total lockdown?

Had enough of people winding me up not social distancing yesterday (that 2nd Sky news video wasn't there when I posted). Next time I'm taking a stick with me to prod people if they approach me or my family within 2m. One of our neighbours died the day before from CV-19.

Edited April 6, 2020 by marg26

[MadManMike]

19 minutes ago, marg26 said:

Had enough of people winding me up not social distancing yesterday (that 2nd Sky news video wasn't there when I posted). Next time I'm taking a stick with me to prod people if they approach me or my family within 2m. One of our neighbours died the day before from CV-19.

Did you see the guy who made an outfit that was basically a massive circle at 2m to stop people going near him?

Was walking through NYC with it, great way to make a point!

[Davetrials]

Decided not to pull the trigger on a new bike seeing as there's a good chance we won't be allowed to exercise outside soon.. probably a good thing. 

[Rusevelt]

Travel restrictions life's in Wuhan after 70 Days of total lockdown.

 

[Tom Booth]

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think we will be in a total lockdown, I can't see our government having it in them t announce it, and the backlash that would come with it. It's a shame as its exactly what needs to be done, but there will be that many exceptions 90% of the public will just use the loopholes to carry on regardless.

Rather then a total lockdown I dont understand why the penalties aren't stricter. Derbyshire police posted on there social media a few days ago that a family had driven from Suffolk to Elvaston castle for a picnic! They got a telling off and sent on there way!? Impound the car, stick them in a taxi home and if it costs them £500 they won't do it again. Step the penalties up and people will soon get the picture.

[MadManMike]

Agreed, the £60 fine halved within 14 days is less than a parking ticket. For a nice day out, £30 is a bargain, right?

I can't see it deterring many people, certainly not the type of people that are willing to do a 100-mile round trip.

[Topsy]

I don't know how high our fines are, but you can be jailed up to three years here, though I can't imagine what you'd have to have done for that! But it's there and I don't think many people want to push it.

We'reallowing meetings of groups of 5 with a 2m distance (feels like the 10ft barge pole reinvented ) and most people seem to be following that.