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Which horse film is your favorite?
This poll is closed.
Black Beauty 2 1.06%
A Talking Pony!?! 4 2.13%
Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor 117 62.23%
War Horse 11 5.85%
Mr. Hands 54 28.72%
Total: 188 votes
[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

 
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Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Discendo Vox posted:

I believe this was before we identified the emergence of the delta variant.

In May, after the WHO identified Delta as a variant of concern and after the CDC “updated” guidance for vaccinated persons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP1vYnExV4g

quote:

[W]e now have science that has really just evolved, even in the last two weeks, that demonstrates that these vaccines are safe, they are effective, they are working in the population just as they did in the clinical trials, that they are working against our variants that we have here circulating in the United States, and that if you were to develop an infection even if you got vaccinated, you can’ transmit that infection to other people.

e:

https://i.imgur.com/LrXSwoB.mp4

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Sep 24, 2021

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Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Platystemon posted:

In May, after the WHO identified Delta as a variant of concern and after the CDC “updated” guidance for vaccinated persons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP1vYnExV4g

I was, at this stage, not following the news (or posting) and beginning to enjoy Suck N gently caress Summer, so I never saw this. Christ this is bad. Real “Mission Accomplished” vibes.

slorb
May 14, 2002
I think the Australian/New Zealand covid experience really shows how seasonal a disease covid is.

The frequent restrictions on movement in Australia & NZ and the large distances between cities make cities fairly independent for Covid purposes and the outcomes have been very different.

There still hasn't been a significant outbreak in any Australian city with warm humid weather.

Cold weather cities on the other hand have problems in winter. Melbourne's currently getting dunked on for the second time and Auckland and Canberra still can't squash their delta outbreaks despite competent authoritarian governments with a lot of popular support.

The only city in the region with a non-authoritarian government (Sydney) has a moderate climate and only ate poo poo once Delta made less authoritarian NPIs like masking and capacity limits ineffective at lower vaccination levels in winter.

The Artificial Kid
Feb 22, 2002
Plibble

slorb posted:

I think the Australian/New Zealand covid experience really shows how seasonal a disease covid is.

The frequent restrictions on movement in Australia & NZ and the large distances between cities make cities fairly independent for Covid purposes and the outcomes have been very different.

There still hasn't been a significant outbreak in any Australian city with warm humid weather.

Cold weather cities on the other hand have problems in winter. Melbourne's currently getting dunked on for the second time and Auckland and Canberra still can't squash their delta outbreaks despite competent authoritarian governments with a lot of popular support.

The only city in the region with a non-authoritarian government (Sydney) has a moderate climate and only ate poo poo once Delta made less authoritarian NPIs like masking and capacity limits ineffective at lower vaccination levels in winter.

No. Sydney had a major outbreak in Summer, getting over a hundred cases per day, but it was non-delta and addressed early with a regional lockdown. None of our governments are "authoritarian".

COVID is a disease that spreads when infected people have contact with uninfected people. The key to stopping it is to prevent that contact.

Chadzok
Apr 25, 2002

slorb posted:

competent authoritarian governments with a lot of popular support

Could this be any more wrong?

Smeef
Aug 15, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!



Pillbug
lol Australia isn't authoritarian. It's an example of what a non-authoritarian government can do in the face of a pandemic.

In the authoritarian version, those protests the other day in Melbourne might have been vaguely rumored in the press if they'd even managed to get organized, and then everyone involved would have had unpleasant outcomes.

wisconsingreg
Jan 13, 2019
I will say that australians seem more fed up with it than most -- partly I think becuase they have an actual lockdown, and partly because it has successfully prevented covid enough that most people never have to deal with it in any capacity, leading to a feeling that the measures are pointless.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

Wasn’t the correlation of lower suicides related to relief checks sent out by the government, rent/mortgage moratoriums, etc?

Because, if so, that’s a pretty damning statement against capitalism.

Yep, I've said it before recently but my suicidal thoughts went away when I was effectively shielded from much of capitalism by going on the disability pension. Capitalism straight up mind-fucks people, especially the more vulnerable people in society.


I'd also like to point out I started feeling really anxious about COVID a couple weeks ago to the point that it affected my ability to function, and then I started doom posting and reading CSPAM more and I'm feeling really good now. Human beings can adjust to situations; it's the not knowing what's really happening, and ignorant hope, and seeing people all glib about a loving pandemic that was really mentally harmful. I feel like now I'm walking into the future equipped to handle what comes next and if it turns out to be less bad then that will be awesome, but I feel I can handle when it goes bad the way I think it will. And seeing other people post doom is comforting, it's nice knowing that other people actually loving care enough about the masses getting sick and dying every day to at the very least post about how it sucks. And you feel like other people are in this poo poo with you. Without CSPAM I felt I was facing this whole pandemic alone and isolated, watching my fellow human beings suffer and die and nobody giving a poo poo because anybody who did wouldn't be so bloody calm about it all the time. Some acknowledgement of the seriousness of what we're facing does wonders to help cope.

So I think people calling for no doom posting are mistaken. Shielding people from gloomy predictions isn't helping them. It does not feel good to have your expectations shattered over and over again because you constantly underestimate the outcomes because you lack information. It does not feel good to have to shield yourself from every bad potential outcome because your ability to cope is built on blind optimism. It is not better to leave anxious people to have to imagine the worst outcomes themselves with their own imaginations. Providing a realistic scenario a person can anchor themselves around knowing it's not just an optimistic projection is much better than avoiding seeing anything "pessimistic". Avoidance is always a terrible coping strategy that hurts you more in the end. I'm not saying this thread should become a CSPAM copy, but I'd chill on getting mad when people post predictions of things going badly or get mad at the government.

There's an opinion from someone who has actually been mentally affected by COVID and the talk around it, not just someone worried about potential people who might be.

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus
^I'm happy for you but I felt the same way and it was actually the opposite that helped me pull out of it, and therapy and meds as well. You can take covid seriously without constant wallowing in nihilism and if you like that, it sounds like you know where else you can get it.^


I cannot believe I feel like I have to break this down this simply, but let me be absolutely clear: I did not say breakthrough cases are rare, I said that fully vaccinated people dying of covid was rare. And unless someone has actual data that suggests it's common, I'm going to continue to believe that and feel safe when I go to the grocery store and shop my list once a week, in and out. I sure as gently caress don't want covid even if I am reasonably certain I won't die from it, and I don't want to spread covid to others if I do potentially have it and am asymptomatic. Delta has been horrible for spreading the virus and killing many more unvaxxed people as it does.

My statements about my well being should also not carry the implication that I blindly trust the Biden admin or agree with their policies. I sure as gently caress wouldn't have lifted the mask mandate! My partner and I were already talking about delta back when that loving happened and saw it for the bungle it was. As far as your own risk assessment, I'm simply advising you to get in check with reality about your risk of catching and dying from covid if properly masked and fully vaxxed, not encouraging you to go to the "Suck and gently caress" Brunch is Back Party. We see like 3 people at max because frankly that's the number of people we trust to be taking covid as seriously as we are.

That's all, go about your posting. Let me know if I need to clarify anything else (if anyone cares). I don't mean to imply that I think the overall quality of posting is bad; there's been some great conversations mixed in with a little bit of yelling past each other and possible mild concern trolling, but I'm still pretty happy with my decision not to probe anyone for cause yet (sorry oocc).

Phigs posted:

There's an opinion from someone who has actually been mentally affected by COVID and the talk around it, not just someone worried about potential people who might be.

Also, I'm sorry to pick on this but as someone who recently had a pretty loving traumatic hospital stay that was exacerbated by staffing issues and hospital overcrowding due to covid, so I feel pretty loving insulted by this insinuation that you are somehow the one lone person who has been mentally affected by covid, and somehow a whole bunch of folks in the thread aren't. I'm gonna say pretty much everyone in here can be assumed to be mentally affected by covid, except maybe for the Kiwis.

Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Sep 24, 2021

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Professor Beetus posted:

I cannot believe I feel like I have to break this down this simply, but let me be absolutely clear: I did not say breakthrough cases are rare, I said that fully vaccinated people dying of covid was rare.

Professor Beetus posted:

If you can't handle the objective fact that fully vaccinated masked up are exceedingly unlikely to get covid, and infinitesimally unlikely to die from it , then it's actually you who needs to stay out of the thread.

Things that are “exceedingly unlikely” are not rare? :confused:

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

Platystemon posted:

“Exceedingly unlikely” is not rare? :confused:

Fuckin hell, that's completely on me. I do a lot of editing on the fly and did not catch that. My bad, that's what the idiot in idiot king is for. I meant that to just be about deaths, not cases. I sure as gently caress do not want covid and am taking what I think are reasonable precautions to prevent that. Again, not suggesting that anyone rejoin the suck and gently caress, thanks.

e: I would be interested to see if masking is taken into account wrt breakthrough cases. I am back to shaving and fitted n95, so I feel reasonably confident about my trips into the grocery or whatever.

Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Sep 24, 2021

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
Anecdotal but we haven't had any vaccinated patient end up in sdu or icu care since vaccines started. Most that get admitted are for obs or a small round of treatment, we haven't had any get the bacterial super pneumonia that we get with unvac

StrangeThing
Aug 23, 2021

by Hand Knit

Phigs posted:

Yep, I've said it before recently but my suicidal thoughts went away when I was effectively shielded from much of capitalism by going on the disability pension. Capitalism straight up mind-fucks people, especially the more vulnerable people in society.


I'd also like to point out I started feeling really anxious about COVID a couple weeks ago to the point that it affected my ability to function, and then I started doom posting and reading CSPAM more and I'm feeling really good now. Human beings can adjust to situations; it's the not knowing what's really happening, and ignorant hope, and seeing people all glib about a loving pandemic that was really mentally harmful. I feel like now I'm walking into the future equipped to handle what comes next and if it turns out to be less bad then that will be awesome, but I feel I can handle when it goes bad the way I think it will. And seeing other people post doom is comforting, it's nice knowing that other people actually loving care enough about the masses getting sick and dying every day to at the very least post about how it sucks. And you feel like other people are in this poo poo with you. Without CSPAM I felt I was facing this whole pandemic alone and isolated, watching my fellow human beings suffer and die and nobody giving a poo poo because anybody who did wouldn't be so bloody calm about it all the time. Some acknowledgement of the seriousness of what we're facing does wonders to help cope.

So I think people calling for no doom posting are mistaken. Shielding people from gloomy predictions isn't helping them. It does not feel good to have your expectations shattered over and over again because you constantly underestimate the outcomes because you lack information. It does not feel good to have to shield yourself from every bad potential outcome because your ability to cope is built on blind optimism. It is not better to leave anxious people to have to imagine the worst outcomes themselves with their own imaginations. Providing a realistic scenario a person can anchor themselves around knowing it's not just an optimistic projection is much better than avoiding seeing anything "pessimistic". Avoidance is always a terrible coping strategy that hurts you more in the end. I'm not saying this thread should become a CSPAM copy, but I'd chill on getting mad when people post predictions of things going badly or get mad at the government.

There's an opinion from someone who has actually been mentally affected by COVID and the talk around it, not just someone worried about potential people who might be.

The CSPAM thread is not doomposting, on a lot of topics it is straight-up misinformation.

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

StrangeThing posted:

The CSPAM thread is not doomposting, on a lot of topics it is straight-up misinformation.

By far the weirdest thing about that thread is its fascination with full-on face respirators.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

Slow News Day posted:

By far the weirdest thing about that thread is its fascination with full-on face respirators.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/cambridge-hospitals-mask-upgrade-appears-to-eliminate-covid-19-risk-to-staff

And there was one where a hospital in the US used the half-face elastomeric respirator for their staff and had zero hospital-acquired infections too but I didn't save it.

I don't think using effective PPE during a pandemic is weird. Your mask tolerance might be low enough or your risk tolerance high enough that you don't personally wear them, but a person who does is making themselves safer. During a pandemic that is killing people. And the thread doesn't say everyone should use them, it recommends n95s and kn95s and yes elastomeric as well as all being good options. It provides people the information on what will protect them and they get to choose what best suits them and nobody cares what it is they go with provided it's effective.

Giving people poo poo for choosing to increase their personal protection during a pandemic is what's weird tbh.

StrangeThing
Aug 23, 2021

by Hand Knit

Phigs posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/cambridge-hospitals-mask-upgrade-appears-to-eliminate-covid-19-risk-to-staff

And there was one where a hospital in the US used the half-face elastomeric respirator for their staff and had zero hospital-acquired infections too but I didn't save it.

I don't think using effective PPE during a pandemic is weird. Your mask tolerance might be low enough or your risk tolerance high enough that you don't personally wear them, but a person who does is making themselves safer. During a pandemic that is killing people. And the thread doesn't say everyone should use them, it recommends n95s and kn95s and yes elastomeric as well as all being good options. It provides people the information on what will protect them and they get to choose what best suits them and nobody cares what it is they go with provided it's effective.

Giving people poo poo for choosing to increase their personal protection during a pandemic is what's weird tbh.

Using effective PPE isn't weird. Being weird about it, is weird.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Phigs posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/cambridge-hospitals-mask-upgrade-appears-to-eliminate-covid-19-risk-to-staff

And there was one where a hospital in the US used the half-face elastomeric respirator for their staff and had zero hospital-acquired infections too but I didn't save it.

I don't think using effective PPE during a pandemic is weird. Your mask tolerance might be low enough or your risk tolerance high enough that you don't personally wear them, but a person who does is making themselves safer. During a pandemic that is killing people. And the thread doesn't say everyone should use them, it recommends n95s and kn95s and yes elastomeric as well as all being good options. It provides people the information on what will protect them and they get to choose what best suits them and nobody cares what it is they go with provided it's effective.

Giving people poo poo for choosing to increase their personal protection during a pandemic is what's weird tbh.

https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-respirators-protect-healthcare-workers-against-infection-with-sars-cov-2

The above appears to be the "study" referenced in the article, which as far as I can tell was never put through peer review (but somehow got an opinion piece in bmj). It looks like all involved just ran with the promotional material Cambridge put out.

-Blackadder-
Jan 2, 2007

Game....Blouses.

Mr. Pardiggle posted:

So I got my third Moderna last night and I feel like a trick hit me. Because I live in a 5 person household with unregulated visitors, I took matters into my own hands last night at the local CVS. It astounds me how harshly my body reacts to these. I think the weirdest side effect is skin sensitivity to the point where wearing clothes hurts.

At any rate, can I expect some higher level of protection as a healthy 29 year old? Long covid scares me the most.

e: also one of the members of the household tested positive this morning so funny how that works lol. Of course someone else had to tell me because neither she nor her fiancé told me.

So the Moderna shot is much larger than Pfizer, in fact the people working on the Moderna booster are saying that it will probably be a half-shot. So the reason you got drilled is that you basically just took two boosters at once.

Fritz the Horse
Dec 26, 2019

... of course!
point of order: the vaccines are named Comirnaty and Spikevax :v:

slorb
May 14, 2002

Smeef posted:

lol Australia isn't authoritarian. It's an example of what a non-authoritarian government can do in the face of a pandemic.

In the authoritarian version, those protests the other day in Melbourne might have been vaguely rumored in the press if they'd even managed to get organized, and then everyone involved would have had unpleasant outcomes.

Well, all protests in Melbourne are currently in breach of public health orders and the fact the police are only arresting a small fraction of the protestors seems to be more a function of the police's lack of capability than anything else. I would suggest that banning all protests is pretty authoritarian.

I am pro-authoritarian myself because it seems that unless we get significantly more effective second generation vaccines there won't be a non-authoritarian way to control winter covid for years.

Smeef
Aug 15, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!



Pillbug

slorb posted:

Well, all protests in Melbourne are currently in breach of public health orders and the fact the police are only arresting a small fraction of the protestors seems to be more a function of the police's lack of capability than anything else. I would suggest that banning all protests is pretty authoritarian.

I am pro-authoritarian myself because it seems that unless we get significantly more effective second generation vaccines there won't be a non-authoritarian way to control winter covid for years.

I'm not sure you can be a fair-weather authoritarian, though. Yes, non-authoritarian regimes can have emergency powers that allow them to deal with situations like pandemics. But they're nowhere near the same as full-blown authoritarianism that extends beyond the scope and timeline of emergency situations. The aspects of authoritarianism that people are wishing for during Covid are not easily switched on and off, and I doubt anyone here would be calling for them during ordinary times.

(Again, I'm not saying Australia is being authoritarian or should be more/less, nor do I know enough about Australia's laws to assess how easily they can transition back to normalcy.)

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Unless there's some idiosyncratic usage I'm not familiar with, FFP3s aren't like EHMRs. And not in some narrow pedantic sense, in the sense that they're more like the European equivalent to an N99--the spec for the both the N99 and FFP3 is for 99% or better of >= 0.3 µm particulate matter, the more familiar N95 is 95%). The story is that they went from using FRSMs, which are surgical masks, to using FFP3s, which are like N99s, and the latter were better protection against covid. This isn't surprising, but if it has anything to do with EHMRs I'm missing something.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

Nah I didn't mean to imply they were using elastomeric respirators I was just covering multiple types of respirators because the post I was responding to wasn't specific on what kind of respirator they thought was weird. Probably talking about the half-mask stuff, but I wanted to show that hospitals were upgrading from surgical masks to respirators and reporting good results, so it makes sense for individuals to make the same kinds of move if they are wanting to improve their safety.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Professor Beetus posted:

Fuckin hell, that's completely on me. I do a lot of editing on the fly and did not catch that. My bad, that's what the idiot in idiot king is for. I meant that to just be about deaths, not cases. I sure as gently caress do not want covid and am taking what I think are reasonable precautions to prevent that. Again, not suggesting that anyone rejoin the suck and gently caress, thanks.

e: I would be interested to see if masking is taken into account wrt breakthrough cases. I am back to shaving and fitted n95, so I feel reasonably confident about my trips into the grocery or whatever.

I’m an elementary school teacher. I wear a 3M 8210 N95 all day. If I don’t get Covid, they work.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Gio posted:

I’m an elementary school teacher. I wear a 3M 8210 N95 all day. If I don’t get Covid, they work.

I’m still facepalming that that’s CDC’s public enemy number three.

enki42
Jun 11, 2001
#ATMLIVESMATTER

Put this Nazi-lover on ignore immediately!

Smeef posted:

(Again, I'm not saying Australia is being authoritarian or should be more/less, nor do I know enough about Australia's laws to assess how easily they can transition back to normalcy.)

Even Australia (from what I've heard, obviously I'm not there so I don't know how accurate this is) employed some measures that wouldn't fly in North America.

A lot of it comes down to lockdown enforcement. From what I've heard, police were authorized (and often did) question people that were outside where they were going. Our Premier tried that in Ontario, and it was quite rightly met with extremely strong public opposition, and he backed down almost immediately. The situation can be different in different places (I don't know much about Australian policing), but police in Canada and the U.S. can absolutely not be trusted to conduct random questioning / carding of people on the street, because they've demonstrated time and time again that they'll use that as a tool to target racialized folks.

Unfortunately, this means that enforcement of lockdowns is much more difficult, approaching impossible. Ontario had a lockdown that I would say on paper wasn't much different from Australia's - you weren't supposed to leave your house for anything other than shopping for essentials or outdoor exercise, you were not supposed to meet anyone from outside your household in any capacity, all retail with the exception of groceries were closed, and stores that sold groceries and other things were limited to groceries only, restaurants were takeout only, schools were closed, etc. In practice the reality was quite a bit different, since the vast majority of restrictions that weren't targeted at businesses couldn't realistically be enforced.

enki42 fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Sep 24, 2021

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

slorb posted:

I think the Australian/New Zealand covid experience really shows how seasonal a disease covid is.

The frequent restrictions on movement in Australia & NZ and the large distances between cities make cities fairly independent for Covid purposes and the outcomes have been very different.

There still hasn't been a significant outbreak in any Australian city with warm humid weather.

Cold weather cities on the other hand have problems in winter. Melbourne's currently getting dunked on for the second time and Auckland and Canberra still can't squash their delta outbreaks despite competent authoritarian governments with a lot of popular support.

The only city in the region with a non-authoritarian government (Sydney) has a moderate climate and only ate poo poo once Delta made less authoritarian NPIs like masking and capacity limits ineffective at lower vaccination levels in winter.

This is nonsense. Sydney's largest outbreak prior to this was over Christmas, the hottest part of the year. Tasmania and NZ's South Island, the coldest parts of the region, have never had major outbreaks. Tropical Vietnam and Thailand were doing fine until Delta, while tropical Brazil has been getting hammered the whole time. All the current Australian outbreak does is prove that Delta is way more contagious than OG COVID and can't be contained with the same level of restrictions that were so successful previously.

Anyway, I no longer remember joy:

https://twitter.com/9NewsMelb/status/1440923886334267392

Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

It's "seasonal" in the sense that outbreaks occur during seasons like winter, spring, summer, fall, wet, and dry.

cant cook creole bream
Aug 15, 2011
I think Fahrenheit is better for weather

Platystemon posted:

I’m still facepalming that that’s CDC’s public enemy number three.



This is really bizare to me. In Germany, N95 are standard for many months now. You explicitly need a medical mask to enter a store.

Stickman posted:

It's "seasonal" in the sense that outbreaks occur during seasons like winter, spring, summer, fall, wet, and dry.

I would heavily disagree. It's abundantly clear that it spreads way more in fall and winter than spring and summer.

cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Sep 24, 2021

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

I mean, it's seasonal when it's endemic, which it has been from the start in North America and Europe. But Melbourne's 2020 spike and Sydney's 2021 spike (which they then loving leaked all over the joint) were just coincidental. They were both failures of quarantine and containment and could have happened at any time of year. They were/are also way, way lower than comparative winter spikes in other global cities of 5 million people, precisely because of the lockdowns which are still working at slowing the spread, if not driving it down to zero.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

cant cook creole bream posted:

This is really bizare to me. In Germany, N95 are standard for many months now. You explicitly need a medical mask to enter a store.

It’s a slight improvement over the version they had up until this very month.

Blitter
Mar 16, 2011

Intellectual
AI Enthusiast

Discendo Vox posted:

https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-respirators-protect-healthcare-workers-against-infection-with-sars-cov-2

The above appears to be the "study" referenced in the article, which as far as I can tell was never put through peer review (but somehow got an opinion piece in bmj). It looks like all involved just ran with the promotional material Cambridge put out.

Rated elastometric masks are indisputably highly effective.

There is a story from early in the pandemic about TCID and their very successful experience with half masks, in a healthcare setting with high exposure to airborne pathogens.

Here's another paper about their use and a more specific performance assessment.

If you come from a position where cloth masks are believed suitable while waiting for indoor seating at your favourite brunch spot, I can see how actual PPE for daily use might seem over the top.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
If elastomeric respirators are overkill, so are bidets.

They do the job more reliably and more comfortably, with less ongoing cost, and they don’t even cost that much initially.

Smeef
Aug 15, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!



Pillbug

Platystemon posted:

If elastomeric respirators are overkill, so are bidets.

They do the job more reliably and more comfortably, with less ongoing cost, and they don’t even cost that much initially.

And as with bidets, Americans don't know how to use them, think they're some weird foreigner poo poo, and would rather walk around with nothing but a flimsy piece of tissue defending the rest of the world from their infected orifices.

slorb
May 14, 2002

freebooter posted:

This is nonsense. Sydney's largest outbreak prior to this was over Christmas, the hottest part of the year. Tasmania and NZ's South Island, the coldest parts of the region, have never had major outbreaks. Tropical Vietnam and Thailand were doing fine until Delta, while tropical Brazil has been getting hammered the whole time.

I don't think that quarantine leaks are more likely in winter so it isn't really surprising that a lot of colder areas in Australasia haven't yet had a winter outbreak. Sydney did crush a couple of very small clusters in winter 2020 but they didn't have anything that came close to straining contact tracing between April 2020 and July 2021. Even Avalon only peaked at 30 cases a day.

Brazil has suffered, but Argentina which is more temperate than Brazil and has had similar vaccination rates was hit harder by delta. Vietnam and Thailand haven't experienced a delta winter yet. I think people are really underestimating how bad things are going to be this coming northern hemisphere winter.

Smeef
Aug 15, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!



Pillbug

slorb posted:

I don't think that quarantine leaks are more likely in winter so it isn't really surprising that a lot of colder areas in Australasia haven't yet had a winter outbreak. Sydney did crush a couple of very small clusters in winter 2020 but they didn't have anything that came close to straining contact tracing between April 2020 and July 2021. Even Avalon only peaked at 30 cases a day.

Brazil has suffered, but Argentina which is more temperate than Brazil and has had similar vaccination rates was hit harder by delta. Vietnam and Thailand haven't experienced a delta winter yet. I think people are really underestimating how bad things are going to be this coming northern hemisphere winter.

Vietnam and Thailand don't really experience winter period, though. Hanoi kinda gets four seasons, and it gets cold in mountain towns, but it wouldn't really qualify as winter anywhere else in the world.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

slorb posted:

I don't think that quarantine leaks are more likely in winter so it isn't really surprising that a lot of colder areas in Australasia haven't yet had a winter outbreak. Sydney did crush a couple of very small clusters in winter 2020 but they didn't have anything that came close to straining contact tracing between April 2020 and July 2021. Even Avalon only peaked at 30 cases a day.

Brazil has suffered, but Argentina which is more temperate than Brazil and has had similar vaccination rates was hit harder by delta. Vietnam and Thailand haven't experienced a delta winter yet. I think people are really underestimating how bad things are going to be this coming northern hemisphere winter.

Sydney didn't crush clusters in winter 2020. They had ongoing transmission from the Crossroads pub cluster in July (which leaked in from a Melbourne truckie stopping for lunch, not from their own hotel quarantine failures) through to October or so. That was it. One cluster, which was crushed by test-trace-isolate protocols, not the weather turning.

Talking about Thailand and Vietnam is even sillier. Bangkok is a fully tropical city. It does not experience "winter" and Thailand did not see a spike in Delta cases from 3,000 a day in mid June to 21,000 a day in mid August because of temperature changes. It experienced that because Delta is more contagious and Thailand's containment measures failed.

Seasons are a factor in the spread of respiratory disease when a virus is endemic and there are only minimal public health measures in place. They are a negligible influence in countries with extremely strict (some might say draconian!) public health measures. I fully expect Australia's cases to shrink to globally low measures by January. That won't be because of the weather: it'll be because we're a relatively authoritarian country which will have some of the strongest stick-carrot vaccination incentives (mostly stick) in the Western world, and will subsequently have gone from a sub-30% vaccination rate in May to one of the world's highest by New Year's. Plus we'll still have all the other poo poo like masks. COVID is a seasonal disease, like any respiratory disease, but the Australian outbreaks are the last place you should be looking for proof of that.

Blitter
Mar 16, 2011

Intellectual
AI Enthusiast

slorb posted:

I don't think that quarantine leaks are more likely in winter so it isn't really surprising that a lot of colder areas in Australasia haven't yet had a winter outbreak. Sydney did crush a couple of very small clusters in winter 2020 but they didn't have anything that came close to straining contact tracing between April 2020 and July 2021. Even Avalon only peaked at 30 cases a day.

Brazil has suffered, but Argentina which is more temperate than Brazil and has had similar vaccination rates was hit harder by delta. Vietnam and Thailand haven't experienced a delta winter yet. I think people are really underestimating how bad things are going to be this coming northern hemisphere winter.

Do you have anything other than some mostly refuted anecdotes for this? I'm in Canada and the worst case rates in my province were during an unseasonably warm early summer.

It was related to a prior reduction in NPI and a too slow response to mounting cases, and had nothing to do with temperature or humidity.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


cant cook creole bream posted:

This is really bizare to me. In Germany, N95 are standard for many months now. You explicitly need a medical mask to enter a store.

Yeah it is super dumb and I don't think that it is a defensible position for the authorities to take.

It made marginally more sense at the beginning when N95s were completely unobtainable to the point that medical personnel couldn't get them, but even then the authorities weren't straight with people about why they shouldn't wear them. Instead of just saying "hey we need these for medical personnel" there was a huge deal made about how actually it was bad for people to wear N95s since they wouldn't wear them right and would somehow increase their chance of infection by fiddling with them.

But for months now N95s and foreign equivalents have been readily available and we know that Covid really doesn't spread by surfaces. Delta was a prime opportunity to say "this strain is more infectious, so use a mask that is rated N95, KN95, KF94, or FFP2. Follow the directions on the mask package when putting the mask on". Instead we got "masks aren't needed if you are vaccinated!" as a carrot to get people vaccinated, which laid bare to a lot of people that the mask guidance was being driven by factors other than the health of the person wearing the mask.

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poll plane variant
Jan 12, 2021

by sebmojo

Smeef posted:

In the authoritarian version, those protests the other day in Melbourne might have been vaguely rumored in the press if they'd even managed to get organized, and then everyone involved would have had unpleasant outcomes.

Starting to think that in the social media age societies with freedom of speech devolve inevitably into spasms of right wing violence and insanity worse than most actual authoritarian governments. I think what you're talking about sounds like a much less stressful way of life than right wing extremists with guns in government buildings every week. I know some authoritarian governments are bad but China sounds drat near utopian right now.

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