BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

uziq wrote:

totally agree. frankly, the trump-supporters have been so derisive of the scientists, experts, epidemiologists, etc, that it fucking blows my mind they want to take the scientific breakthrough as as 'trump victory'.

One of my "I don't support Trump (but unspoken I secretly do so here's another haha take that liberals pro-Trump meme)" contacts can be directly quoted as saying, earlier this year, "fuck the epidemiologists." Of course, he denies saying that even though I remember it clearly. Other gems include "I guess I'll stand aside and let my "betters" (the experts) make all my decisions. /s"

He wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for medical experts. He also wouldn't have function in at least two of his limbs if it wasn't for medical attention.

Meanwhile in TX and ND, anyway:

A nurse in a strained El Paso hospital says the sickest COVID-19 patients are put in a doctor-less room called 'the pit' where they are given 3 chances to be revived before workers let them die
https://news.yahoo.com/nurse-strained-e … 36368.html
(I think I posted something about "the pit" earlier)

South Dakota ER nurse recalls how dying coronavirus patients spend last minutes insisting virus isn't real
https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-dakota … 00579.html

I don't know how much of that is "the virus isn't real" denial or "I'm actually dying? No way" denial. In either case, the Dakotas are NOT the place to be right now.

Still chilling—El Paso County jail inmates hired to load bodies of deceased #COVID19 patients into emergency overflow morgues for just $2/hour, 8 hours/day. Previously just weekdays, but now weekends too. It seems their PPE is goggles & KN95 & apron.

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1 … 3664128000

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/15 … ue-deaths/

Constitution says we can use prisoners as slave labor.

13th Amendment wrote:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

No but we need the prisons to keep low education blacks under control and away from everyone else. And low education whites in rural places get unionized jobs, guns, and uniforms to feel good about themselves. Prisoners don't contribute to unemployment numbers. And since we can't produce real economic opportunity security jobs are a must.

Boomer I was talking about it with today took that $2 and segued into how little people used to make, though eventually acknowledged that yes, cost of living/wage stagnation has since been increasingly problematic. I wrenched the topic back into the sad state of prisoners handling plague bodies with questionable PPE, hazmat training (?) for $2/hr in 2020, and maybe only because they refused to do it uncompensated. I don't know what his goal was talking about the late 60s and early 70s, but I had to think fast to keep it from going into a 20 minute monologue about the (unironic) joys and brilliance of Nixon and Reagan.

To his credit he did comment that yes, it was a pretty sad state and indicated stagnant progress from 1918 on.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 … ansmission

new human-to-human transmission of an ebola-type virus in bolivia.

peru is also struggling with a dual wave of covid and dengue fever.

so you'll finally shut up about the chinese's unique filthy bat flu, then?

this one in bolivia came from rats.

the most deadly plagues in human history, particularly for western europe, came from rats also. or fleas.

you don't need an exotic delicacy on the menu to start these things.  you can cool it with your racism.

dilbert: we must stop inhumane and massively ecologically harmful factory farming for protein consumption.
also dilbert: ew! the chinese eat vermin and insects for protein!

most populations who have been blighted by murine illnesses don't eat rats. it makes no difference.

who cares? zoonotic illnesses are not about diet. time and time again epidemiological studies have been linked here which show that the main factor in their exposure and introduction to human populations is habitat overlap/ecological interruption, not exotic, scary-looking local delicacies.

Eating exotic scary looking delicacies is nonetheless rarely a good idea.

I am also not opposed to farming

Last edited by Larssen (2020-11-17 04:19:36)

Dilbert_X wrote:

And most of the habitat overlap is due to expanding farms and interaction between farm animals and wild animals such as bats.
Its still 50:50 whether that was the route or it leaked from the wuhan lab.

So yeah - cut out livestock farming -> cut out zoonotic illness transmission to people.

it's resource extraction in general. is the engineer-in-chief in support of not opening new mines or ore processing facilities? as long as there will be mountains, jungles, woods or highlands with untapped resources, we are probably going to disturb an ecosystem and drag a few zoonotic illnesses into our domain.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Meanwhile, in Australia

After a single day of no cases its time to come out of lockdown.
Seems like yesterday the metric was two cycles or four weeks of no cases, but its OK because the Premier is 'following the science'.

And its back, a huge indian family all moonlighting between quarantine hotels, aged care, prison etc have infected themselves.
The health minister is refusing to say if they attended the Diwali festival.

Everything was opened up and now we have 4,000+ in quarantine.

Morons.