Coronaviral

[Vesper 28,825]

5 hours ago, Tomo said:

This thing may finally get me (if it hasn't without me knowing) as someone I went out on the piss with on Saturday has returned a positive test.

That said my friends parent got it and no one else in their household followed suit so maybe I'll get lucky.

Are you fully vaxxed? If so, the odds of you dying or even getting so sick you end up in the ICU are massively low.

[Tomo 21,733]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Are you fully vaxxed? If so, the odds of you dying or even getting so sick you end up in the ICU are massively low.

Had the second one the day before the super cup so I've just fallen short of not having to isolate (as a close contact), typical

I'm not too worried about getting seriously ill as I think a combination of vaccine status plus age should (touch wood) see me through, it's weirdly the prospect of losing my smell and/or taste that I am worried about (I know this is ridiculously trivial compared to what others are going through) as dinner will be the highlight of my day for the next week, lol.

[Warning_Hazard 156]

Protection from Covid vaccines starts to wane after 6 months

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/covid-coronavirus-latest-updates-travel-list-announcement-vaccine-protection-zoe-study-news-b952201.html

[YorkshireBlue 3,122]

12 hours ago, Warning_Hazard said:

Protection from Covid vaccines starts to wane after 6 months

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/covid-coronavirus-latest-updates-travel-list-announcement-vaccine-protection-zoe-study-news-b952201.html

Oh great. Vaccine every 6 months they can fuck right off! 

[Vesper 28,825]

4 hours ago, BluesMadLad said:

Oh great. Vaccine every 6 months they can fuck right off! 

more like 8 months post 2nd jab for the 1st booster and the they think it will last a lot longer

[Vesper 28,825]

[Warning_Hazard 156]

6 hours ago, Vesper said:

Look into pfizer's history, Johnson and johnson also. Responsible for cervical cancer in women from talc, regular billion dollar lawsuits over all sorts.

Big pharma = big scam

You talked about the boosters but foget that the virus is changing abroad rapidly which will render even booster programs hopeless.

Brown paper envelopes.

[Atomiswave 6,072]

2 hours ago, Warning_Hazard said:

Look into pfizer's history, Johnson and johnson also. Responsible for cervical cancer in women from talc, regular billion dollar lawsuits over all sorts.

Big pharma = big scam

You talked about the boosters but foget that the virus is changing abroad rapidly which will render even booster programs hopeless.

Brown paper envelopes.

The likes of Phizer are amongst the worst.....yet they get to produce this vax for covid. Their repu was already in tatters before all this.

[Vesper 28,825]

[Warning_Hazard 156]

3 hours ago, Atomiswave said:

The likes of Phizer are amongst the worst.....yet they get to produce this vax for covid. Their repu was already in tatters before all this.

None of them even took liability, Meaning they cant get sued by anyone etc!

[Atomiswave 6,072]

DP

Edited August 26, 2021 by Atomiswave

[Atomiswave 6,072]

2 hours ago, Warning_Hazard said:

None of them even took liability, Meaning they cant get sued by anyone etc!

Yes I know, no politician or pharma can be brought to justice, you cant take them to court. Thats mighty shady.

For anyone whom wants to see the other side of the coin, watch this fully, especially pay attention to min 18:30

https://hugotalks.com/2021/08/26/do-celebrities-have-blood-on-their-hands-hugo-talks-lockdown/

[Vesper 28,825]

Boardmasters festival: New Delta strain believed to have emerged among 53,000 revellers at Cornwall event

Almost 5,000 infections have been linked to the Boardmasters festival in Cornwall, and with half a million music lovers at even larger events over the Bank Holiday, officials fear revellers are being hit by a new strain of the Delta variant

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/boardmasters-festival-new-delta-strain-cornwall-event-1172393

Fears are rising that a new strain of the Delta variant of Covid-19 has emerged among festival goers after an event attended by 53,000 revellers in Cornwall led to sharp spike in cases among younger people.

With this Bank Holiday weekend witnessing the highest number of music lovers flocking to festivals in 18 months, Public Health England (PHE) is understood to be investigating a possible new Delta strain that may have emerged from the Boardmasters festival in Newquay two weeks ago.

A senior official working on pandemic response in the south-west of England said many of the infections among young people in the region had been identified as coming directly from the festival in Newquay, which now has the highest rate of infection in England at more than 2,000 per 100,000 people.

The source told i: “It was traced because they can identify where it came from by genetic changes in the code.”

While it is being referred to among hospital staff in Devon and Cornwall as the “festival variant”, it is believed to be a new strain of Delta rather than an entirely new variant. Delta already has around a dozen different strains.

“It’s still the Delta variant but they can say it came from the festival, hence why it is being called the ‘festival variant’,” added the official.

The South-west peninsula now home to eight of the top ten areas in England with the highest rates of infection. The figures also show that around half of all infections in England are among those under 30, with the highest rate of infection now in the 10 to 19-year-old age bracket.

Cornwall Council has already linked almost 5,000 Covid infections to Boardmasters, with local health officials saying they “won’t know the complete picture for another few days.”

With around half a million people at music festivals such as those in Reading, Leeds and Let’s Rock Scotland in Edinburgh over the past few days, a senior Government scientific advisor has warned that such mass gatherings offer the virus a far greater opportunity to spread than any other outdoor event type, including at football matches.

Professor John Drury, a member of the Government’s Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) – which is a sub-committee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (commonly known as Sage), called on the Government to mandate festival organisers to implement stronger Covid-safe measures to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Speaking in a personal capacity, Professor Drury said: “Different mass events have been found to be associated with very different rates of infection, and one factor explaining this is the crowd culture.

“The [Government’s] Events Research Programme noted that fan behaviour at the Euros was very different than at Wimbledon, for example. And we can expect greater physical intimacy– touching, close interaction, hugging, sharing drinks etc – at a music festival than at other large events.

“One of the key reasons that some people are engaging less with these basic protective behaviours is that the Government has basically said ‘it’s safe now, it’s fine, you’re not going to die’. The problem is of course that 100 people a day are dying. We need to support new norms around safety at the festivals.”

Dr Zubaida Haque, a member of Independent Sage, added: “The thing about mass gatherings is that people are right to think outside is safer than inside, but it’s the travelling back and forth to the mass gatherings that’s one of the main issues. If that mass gathering is for several days, like a music festival, then there’s also going to be a lot more contact between people, which give the virus more opportunity to spread.”

Andrew George, a Cornwall councillor and former Liberal Democrat MP, slammed the Government for “populist headline-chasing above being guided by the science”.

He added: “The fact is the more we have political leaders who prefer to chase favourable headlines, ignore the science and play to the Libertarian right the more we risk creating a more virulent vaccine resistant strain.”

Jayne Kirkham, who is also Cornwall councillor, said: “Many people that went to Boardmasters were 16-29. Very few were double vaccinated, and I don’t know any who went that did not get Covid.”

Public Health England declined to comment.

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,852]

Reading festival would have been a covid cauldron

[Vesper 28,825]

Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty

How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/

In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

Conor Friedersdorf: How to protect civil liberties in a pandemic

The nation’s high court struck down a challenge to the country’s COVID-19 restrictions. “It may be accepted that the travel restrictions are harsh. It may also be accepted that they intrude upon individual rights,” it ruled. “But Parliament was aware of that.” Until last month, Australians who are residents of foreign countries were exempt from the rule so they could return to their residence. But the government tightened the restrictions further, trapping many of them in the country too.

Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”

In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.

Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?

Read: New Zealand’s prime minister may be the most effective leader on the planet

Enduring rules of that sort would certainly render a country a police state. In year two of the pandemic, with COVID-19 now thought to be endemic, rather than a temporary emergency the nation could avoid, how much time must pass before we must regard Australia as illiberal and unfree?

To give Australia’s approach its due, temporary restrictions on liberty were far more defensible early in the pandemic, when many countries locked down and scientists understood little about COVID-19’s attributes or trajectory. Australian leaders hoped to “flatten the curve” of infection in an effort to prevent overcrowded hospitals and degraded care, and the higher death rates that would follow. The country was also betting that, within a time period short enough that restrictions could be sustained, scientists would develop a vaccine that protected against morbidity and mortality.

As it turned out, the bet paid off. Had it behaved rationally and adequately valued liberty, a rich nation like Australia would have spent lavishly—before knowing which vaccines would turn out to be most effective—to secure an adequate supply of many options for its people. It could afford to eat the cost of any extra doses and donate them to poorer countries. Australia then could have marshaled its military and civil society to vaccinate the nation as quickly as possible, lifted restrictions more fully than Europe and the United States did, and argued that the combination of fewer deaths and the more rapid return to normalcy made their approach a net win.

Instead, Australia invested inadequately in vaccines and, once it acquired doses, was too slow to get them into arms. “Of the 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that have been released to the government by manufacturer CSL, only about 8 million have gone into the arms of Australians,” The Age reported on August 21, citing concern about blood clots and a widespread preference for the Pfizer vaccine. “A further 1.6 million doses have been sent offshore to help regional neighbours such as Papua New Guinea, Fiji and East Timor tackle COVID-19. But about 6 million doses are yet to be used, even as more than half the nation is in lockdown due to outbreaks of the highly infectious Delta variant.” Australia’s low infection and death rates, which the country achieved both by being surrounded by water and by adopting harsh restrictions on liberty, seemed to sap its urgency when it came time to vaccinate—even though that lack of urgency meant months more of basic human rights being abrogated. In hindsight, more urgency to get jabs in arms to end the restrictions would have saved lives, because the country would have been better protected against the unexpected Delta variant.

In return for trading away their liberty, Australians gained a huge safety dividend. COVID-19 has killed 194 of every 100,000 Americans, 77 of every 100,000 Israelis, and only four of every 100,000 Australians. That low death toll is a tremendous upside. What remains to be seen is whether Australia can maintain that performance without permanently ending core attributes of life in a liberal democracy, including freedom of movement, peaceable assembly, and basic privacy.

Read: Where the pandemic is cover for authoritarianism

If the country quickly reinstates its citizens’ pre-pandemic liberties, it can argue that the loss of liberty was only temporary (though some restrictions, such as a prohibition on leaving the country, would still seem needless if the goal was minimizing the spread of COVID-19 in the country). And if Australia’s death rate remains lower than Israel’s or America’s, Australian leaders can plausibly tell their citizens that the deprivation was worth it. If not, supporters will have a much harder time defending a record that includes handcuffing a small group of teenagers after they gathered for an outdoor hangout.

More important than whether or not the past can be justified is what the country does from now on. Promising murmurs are coming from some politicians. “New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian vowed to reopen the state once 70% of those 16 and older get vaccinated,” Reuters reported Sunday. “No matter what the case numbers are doing … double-dose 70% in NSW means freedom for those who are vaccinated." But in Victoria, the country’s next-most-populous state, the news organization reports that “Premier Daniel Andrews said his state’s lockdown, due to end on Thursday, will be extended, but would not say for how long.”

Because of its geography, Australia is a neighbor and an observer of authoritarian countries as varied as China and Singapore. But its own fate, too, may turn on whether its people crave the feeling of safety and security that orders from the top confer, or whether they want to be free.

 

[nyikolajevics 2,577]

Just learned I got this shit.. Feeling fine, have to be separated, I am only angry because it’s international football week, why covid didn’t hit me when Premier League/NFL/NBA was ongoing?

 

Keep healthy friends

Edited September 5, 2021 by nyikolajevics

[Vesper 28,825]

8 hours ago, nyikolajevics said:

Just learned I got this shit.. Feeling fine, have to be separated, I am only angry because it’s international football week, why covid didn’t hit me when Premier League/NFL/NBA was ongoing?

 

Keep healthy friends

I hope you sail through this m8

hugz

[Vesper 28,825]

roflmao