The Wuhan virus—how are we doing? - Page 95 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15167841
Just to note that Sweden is now down to 29th in terms of deaths per million. Completely exposing the lies of the lockdown Liberals. They said without lockdown it would spiral out of control, their health system would collapse and that in such conditions 3, 4 or even 5% of the population would end up dying of Covid. We're well into the second year of the plandemic and Sweden death rate stands at less than one seventh of one percent. The idea that the US didn't lockdown is another Lockdown liberal lie. All the biggest metropolitan areas locked down. The idea that Trump was responsible for these deaths is a sick joke. In the worst effected counties of the worst effected states there was hardly a Republican to be seen. The lockdowns in these Liberal counties in Liberal run cities in Liberal run states were total failures. They were led trump hating democrats whose overriding concern was to tank the economy and destroy Trumps' re-election campaign.

And no by calling it a plandemic I am not suggesting that western Liberals or the pharmaceutical-sickness industrial complex caused the outbreak, just that they pre planned to take advantage of something like this for years or even decades.
#15167851
Rich wrote:Completely exposing the lies of the lockdown Liberals.
Really? Sweden with a population of 10 million has (13,788 deaths) Where does South Korea(1,801), Taiwan(11), Thailand(97), Australia(910) and New Zealand(26) fit into your fucked up fantasy world? All these places did proper lockdowns.

Rich wrote:The idea that the US didn't lockdown is another Lockdown liberal lie
USA did a half-assed lockdown, which is about the same as not locking down. USA took over a month to close borders.

Rich wrote:In the worst effected counties of the worst effected states there was hardly a Republican to be seen.
That's the bold-faced lie. I suppose Texas and Florida are not Republican states? They are among the top 4 worst states for covid infections, alongside California and New York.

Rich wrote: The idea that Trump was responsible for these deaths is a sick joke.
:roll: Trump contributed to inaction. It's not a joke. It's fucking disgusting that this piece of shit cost American lives.

You choose not to remember Trump downplaying the pandemic.
You choose not to remember Trump telling people not to wear a mask and not setting an example.
You choose not to remember Trump eroding trust in medical institutions.
You choose not to remember Trump's inaction throughout the pandemic, and his complete lack of leadership.

Why? Because you're a Trump-cultist and he can do not wrong in your eyes. :knife:
#15167853
Godstud wrote::roll: If they've already had the first done, then they are in the process of being vaccinated, and your statement about EU and Canada "muddling through" was utter stupidity. :knife:


...And if the US has given both doses to the same share of its population as Canada has then it means it is still doing far better in this regard.
#15167858
@wat0n I never said that Canada was doing a better job. The only thing USA has done very well is handle getting vaccines to it's people. Over 550,000 Americans have died, though. I imagine that countries without such high death tolls aren't as desperate for the vaccine.
#15167859
Godstud wrote:@wat0n I never said that Canada was doing a better job. The only thing USA has done very well is handle getting vaccines to it's people. Over 550,000 Americans have died, though. I imagine that countries without such high death tolls aren't as desperate for the vaccine.


I don't know honestly. There are some with lowish death tolls that moved quickly regardless (e.g. Israel). Others with high death tolls have been largely slow, even leaving the EU aside (e.g. Brazil).

It seems to me there were two kinds of broad philosophies, the first one was to do whatever it took to stop transmission, including massive hard lockdowns, with little regard to other possible costs of the measures taken to that effect. The second one was more aware of the other costs of lockdowns, and seems to have been centered on selective lockdowns (doing hard and massive ones when the healthcare system was under stress only, for instance), and vaccinating quickly.

As you said, the US and the UK have had a high death toll but it's not clear yet if that necessarily means using the second broad philosophy was necessarily a mistake. If there are 1-2 more big waves, the ones that will have to deal with it are largely the countries that haven't moved forward with vaccinations - but it's possible there won't be such waves.

At last, there's the case of the EU which falls into its own category given how it went about vaccine procurement.
#15167860
The problem with looking at the numbers between nations is that they are all likely not apples to apples. Basically, an entire study needs to be done just to figure out if it's even valid to compare nation to nation numbers on infections and death. This sort of study will takes years upon years if anyone even bothers to do it. I'm not saying we shouldn't compare numbers, but you have to keep in mind that these comparisons are under an assumption that is more likely to be wrong, than correct.

This is the kind of shit I deal with in my job day to day (my job is like 80% data analysis). Basically, validating if its even fair to directly compare different metrics from different sources. More often than not, the conclusion is that it's not fair to do direct comparisons of metrics. I spend more time validating my test methodology, and the sources of the metrics I'm trying to do analysis on, than collecting the metrics themselves and drawing conclusions. This is the proper way to do it, and it's going to be true in any sort of data analysis scenario. I think this is a mistake untrained people and the media do. They collect or look at data, and just run with it and make all sorts of conclusions, and never bother to question the data itself, or question/validate the collection methodologies. This validation part is what makes science slow, but it is necessary. I'm damn sure no one can answer this question in just a year either. Thus, everyone, even the experts are working off assumptions. I also think this is why you don't really see scientist cross comparing numbers much; it's the media and people doing that, which... it likely wrong.

Here's a quote from a well known performance analysis expert in my field. I literally have this printed on a paper hanging outside my cubicle.

"If you've only been looking at a benchmark for 1 week. It's probably wrong." This is just for a simple benchmark test on a CPU. This quote is just so fucking true. Every time I run analysis, my first pass conclusions have ALWAYS been wrong. :lol: It isn't until I go back into the test, and run tests that test my test, do I get at something that is a much more real and valid conclusion.

If we're talking about a global pandemic with political overtones, I would amend it to be

"If you've only been looking at the data for a year, it's probably wrong."

Ultimately, any sort of conclusions drawn in this thread, are probably wrong. Hence why I avoid the "which nations is worse than which based on the numbers" kind of shit.
#15167914
ImageDrop us a line for your free empathy-rebuilding kit!
empathysos.com


Drlee wrote:Isn't it interesting that we cannot have a thread about Covid 19 without it devolving to a debate about economics. Clearly there is an enormous economic effect from the pandemic but it certainly seems that *partisan ranting and self-promotion deleted*. If I hear one more story about how left handed gingers are not getting their fair share of vaccine I am going to throw up.

At the risk of making an on-topic post I would mention this: *partisan ranting and self-promotion deleted*

Most people attach their own egos to anything that appears on their screens. So even a pandemic has concerned posters like Godstud yelling about stats... in order to win some game.

LIkewise, most of the post above was political promotion and blame-game. Self-interested entirely, just like Godstud's game he's trying to selfishly win with words.

We have reached zero empathy and zero concern for community in rich, Western countries inside the core of imperialism.

These are signs that our civilization has created, at its core, an unsustainable level of selfishness and lack of empathy - and these are the real diseases that are behind a lot of our more tangible world crises.
#15167972
Potemkin wrote:Even beavers adapt their environment to their own needs by building dams. We just do it on a much bigger scale, that's all.

Beavers do it in an all natural way, while we don't, so there's a qualitative difference either.

As Sir David Attenborough has said we are “intruders” and “latecomers” to the planet, maybe we're colonisers or invaders too, but whatever he meant we, unlike beavers, definitely deny and defy the laws or rules of the natural world, including natural selection, which natural world, according to Sir David at least, "by-and-large, would do much better if we weren’t there at all." So no, we're not just beavers on a much bigger scale. We're something different, we may even be something alien to the natural world, but we're certainly outsiders who don't fit at least.
#15167987
QatzelOk wrote:We have reached zero empathy and zero concern for community in rich, Quebec inside the core of imperialism.
I fixed it for you.

I am merely getting the facts straight, for people who only have a fact-absent political agenda. I am not surprised that you can't see that, @QatzelOk, since your political agenda is not dissimilar.
#15168003
A day late, but here's where we stand:

Image

And the US death rate continues to drop, along with 26 states (including Texas, Florida, & California) and another three whose death rates didn't change. That leaves 21 states whose rates went up (including New York), along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ten states with the highest death rates are:

  1. Michigan
  2. New Jersey
  3. Alaska
  4. Georgia
  5. New York
  6. Delaware
  7. West Virginia
  8. Montana
  9. Kentucky
  10. Pennsylvania

The ten states with the lowest death rates are:

  1. Nebraska
  2. Utah
  3. Hawaii
  4. Oregon
  5. Wyoming
  6. Colorado
  7. Wisconsin
  8. Oklahoma
  9. Tennessee
  10. New Hampshire

Like Oklahoma last week, Nebraska's must be the result of another adjustment--you don't often get negative death rates in a pandemic....

Image

Image

So Missouri and North Carolina have joined the 90%+ set, with New Mexico hitting 100%. And in a first, I think, Georgia has dropped out of the 90%+ set.

At the bottom of the list, California is no longer the worst-off state, that honor now goes to Hawaii (by 0.3%). At 34.9% & 34.6% they are the only two states below 40%, with only Washington (43.9%) and Oregon (45.7%) the only others below 50%.

And from last Wednesday:

U.S. intel chief: Coronavirus originated either from Chinese lab breach or infected animal
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told Congress on Wednesday the COVID-19 pandemic began either from an accident at a Chinese laboratory or through an infected animal who passed it along to humans.

“Basically [intelligence] components have coalesced around two alternative theories,” Ms. Haines said in her first appearance as DNI before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “These scenarios are [that] it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident,” she said.

The comments contradict the recent conclusions of a joint World Health Organization-Chinese government report that dismissed the lab as “extremely unlikely.”

American scientists as recently as several months ago dismissed the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory as a “conspiracy theory.” Ms. Haines’ comments on the laboratory escape theory are the first official public comments by a senior intelligence official on the likelihood the virus began in a Chinese laboratory.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology and other laboratories in China have been the focus of American intelligence agencies seeking clues to the origin of the deadly disease outbreak that has claimed over 2 million lives worldwide. In January, the State Department released a fact sheet on the institute that said there was substantial circumstantial evidence the virus began there.

The evidence included workers at the lab who were sickened with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019; work on a bat coronavirus that is 96% similar to the virus that causes COVID, known as SARS-CoV-2; and secret work at the laboratory by the People’s Liberation Army, which has conducted animal experiments there.

The testimony contradicts the assertions of the Chinese government that the virus could not have come from one of its laboratories.

Liang Wannian, leader of the Chinese team that conducted the joint WHO-China study said the experts “agreed unanimously” that “it is extremely unlikely that the virus leaked from the lab.” Mr. Liang said that, as a result, future virus origin-tracing missions would no longer focus on the lab escape theory unless new evidence is presented.

Ms. Haines did not provide details for the two theories, but emphasized that the intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the virus emerged and spread. Intelligence agencies are continuing to collect information on the virus origin, she said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the Republican vice chairman of the committee, said a laboratory accident is plausible because “to date no such path of zoonotic transmission has been definitely identified.”

“Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have demonstrated from their publications that they were skilled at techniques in which they genetically modified bat coronaviruses in order to create new man-made viruses that were highly capable of creating diseases in human beings,” said Mr. Rubio, Florida Republican.

Several laboratory leaks of viruses have been documented in China, including the original SARS virus, he said.

Mr. Rubio also noted that American diplomats who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses high security bio-research labs, warned in 2018 of poor security.

“We can’t conclude that the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged naturally until there’s been a transmission chain that has identified how the virus evolved and transmitted between species,” he said.

CIA Director William Burns, also testifying before the Senate panel Wednesday, said he agreed with Ms. Haines.

“The one thing that’s clear to us and our analysts is that the Chinese leadership has not been fully forthcoming or fully transparent in working with the WHO or providing the kind of original, complete data that would help answer those questions,” Mr. Burns testified.
#15168012
Beren wrote:Beavers do it in an all natural way, while we don't, so there's a qualitative difference either.

As Sir David Attenborough has said we are “intruders” and “latecomers” to the planet, maybe we're colonisers or invaders too, but whatever he meant we, unlike beavers, definitely deny and defy the laws or rules of the natural world, including natural selection, which natural world, according to Sir David at least, "by-and-large, would do much better if we weren’t there at all." So no, we're not just beavers on a much bigger scale. We're something different, we may even be something alien to the natural world, but we're certainly outsiders who don't fit at least.

We think too highly of ourselves. We're just another endemic species which has temporarily overrun the ecosystem, due to having no effective natural predators and no self-control. Under the right conditions, almost any animal population can reach plague proportions. And it's a self-correcting problem - the very 'success' of such a species creates the conditions for a population crash of that species, as they destroy their own food stocks and foul their own environment. Humans aren't the first species to do this, and we won't be the last either. The only difference is that we should be smart enough to know better. But apparently not. Lol.
#15168013
Potemkin wrote:We think too highly of ourselves. We're just another endemic species which has temporarily overrun the ecosystem, due to having no effective natural predators and no self-control. Under the right conditions, almost any animal population can reach plague proportions. And it's a self-correcting problem - the very 'success' of such a species creates the conditions for a population crash of that species, as they destroy their own food stocks and foul their own environment. Humans aren't the first species to do this, and we won't be the last either. The only difference is that we should be smart enough to know better. But apparently not. Lol.

For most of human history, the vast majority of the human population lived on the edge of starvation, with any advances in agriculture only temporarily changing that until the population could expand to the edge again, with the occasional population crash as counterpoint--a drop in population (and the accompanying economic crash) is one of the five major reasons for the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire. It's only in the past few centuries that technological progress has been so fast that starvation has become a dim memory for most of humanity, and we started laboring under the (possible) illusion that it will continue that way indefinitely.

But I do have to disagree on one point, that we don't have any self control. If anything, we may have too much control, with Western birth rates dropping dangerously low.

But this is all something of a digression from the thread topic.
#15168015
Doug64 wrote:For most of human history, the vast majority of the human population lived on the edge of starvation, with any advances in agriculture only temporarily changing that until the population could expand to the edge again, with the occasional population crash as counterpoint--a drop in population (and the accompanying economic crash) is one of the five major reasons for the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire. It's only in the past few centuries that technological progress has been so fast that starvation has become a dim memory for most of humanity, and we started laboring under the (possible) illusion that it will continue that way indefinitely.

All this very true. But it just tells us that Homo sapiens was not a particularly successful species until very recently - and by "very recently" I mean the past couple of thousand years. It's only since then that we've become a dominant part of the ecosystem. And all the signs are that this dominance is unsustainable.

But I do have to disagree on one point, that we don't have any self control. If anything, we may have too much control, with Western birth rates dropping dangerously low.

Define "dangerously". And this wouldn't have anything to do with replacement theory would it...? :eh:

But this is all something of a digression from the thread topic.

Indeed it is, but not too much of a digression - after all, contagious disease is one of the means by which the population of an endemic species can be culled by its environment. I suspect we'll see much more of this in the future....
#15168047
Potemkin wrote:We think too highly of ourselves. We're just another endemic species which has temporarily overrun the ecosystem, due to having no effective natural predators and no self-control. Under the right conditions, almost any animal population can reach plague proportions. And it's a self-correcting problem - the very 'success' of such a species creates the conditions for a population crash of that species, as they destroy their own food stocks and foul their own environment. Humans aren't the first species to do this, and we won't be the last either. The only difference is that we should be smart enough to know better. But apparently not. Lol.

Sure, we're just another regular species on this planet, just regular fish behaving like beavers on a much bigger scale. :lol:
#15168049
Beren wrote:Sure, we're just another regular species on this planet, just regular fish behaving like beavers on a much bigger scale. :lol:

You need to read this, @Beren....

Your Inner Fish

Long story short: we're fish, @Beren. Humans are highly evolved fish. Our remote ancestors were fish. And because a fish can never give birth to anything which is not itself a fish, we are still fish, even to this day. Your response to this fact reminds me of the Anglican cleric who once rhetorically asked T.H. Huxley on which side of his family tree he claimed to be descended from monkeys: his mother's or his father's. Lol. :)
#15168053
Beren wrote:I'd actually like to read your own book on humanity.

"The Dam-building Fish - Monkeys or Beavers?" by Potemkin. :excited:

We are both fish, and reptiles, and mammals, and primates, and great apes, and hominids, @Beren. We're not beavers though. Lol. ;)

Seriously though, why do you reject evolutionary theory, @Beren? You don't strike me as being particularly religious. Does it just offend your sense of humanism? I'd genuinely like to know.
#15168057
Potemkin wrote:We are both fish, and reptiles, and mammals, and primates, and great apes, and hominids, @Beren. We're not beavers though. Lol. ;)

Seriously though, why do you reject evolutionary theory, @Beren? You don't strike me as being particularly religious. Does it just offend your sense of humanism? I'd genuinely like to know.

I don't reject evolutionary theory, I rather reject or disagree with some of your perceptions (of mankind) perhaps.

I'm sad we're not beavers, but you've made my day anyway. I really needed this, thank you. :)
Last edited by Beren on 20 Apr 2021 13:32, edited 1 time in total.
#15168058
late wrote:We share 60% of DNA with beavers, but then that's also true of bananas and fruit flies; and roughly 80% with some fish.

https://sciencing.com/animals-share-human-dna-sequences-8628167.html

Exactly. We're not "interlopers"; we are very much an integral part of the ecosystem. We have just been rather too successful at multiplying our numbers recently, that's all. We shouldn't let it go to our heads - Nature is bigger than we are, and will humble us sooner rather than later. At the moment, for example, our economies and societies are being devastated by a life form which is too small for us even to see. Lol.
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