Pandemics and Epidemiology (COVID-19, monkeypox, etc.)

I've been fairly lucky that nobody has targeted me for racism so far, although I guess it helps that everyone is wearing a mask and nobody is keen to look close enough to identify my race.

Brazil has become the country with the second largest number of cases, and the number of new cases per day is still growing.

In Russia, the number of daily new cases is roughly stable for the past two weeks - but pretty high.

Sad to see our attention has been turned away from the Covid crisis, and towards the escalating civil unrest here in the US.

The question is, why did the the riots and protests go on for nearly a week now? Didn't the cop already got charged and is in custody? Why do people keep protesting and looting and destroying when they made their point clear in the first few days? I assume there's agitators in play here, because if people keep gathering and rioting like this then the second wave of the epidemic in the US will hit them HARD.

It took several days for the officer to be charged and arrested, and there's no guarantee that it'll go any farther, as pretty much every step of the justice system have gone "I see nothing wrong with what he did". Plus the other officers who stood around and watched as the man died have only been suspended and not charged. And the cops' response to initial protests was to escalate by shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into peaceful crowds.

Yeah the guy only got arrested or or two days ago, his accomplices still haven’t been arrested.

On top of that there’s a lot else to protest, the fact that it took massive protests to get an arrest, the fact that the guy had a record of police brutality but is only facing consequences now, the heavy handed police response to protests.

Also the arresting of a black news crew when they had done nothing wrong, the fact that two other news crews have been shot at, the fact that another news crew may have been targeted with gas, the incident where several cops executed a no-knock plainclothes warrant on the wrong address (looking for a guy already in custody) and shot an innocent women in her bed before arresting her boyfriend (who is still in custody).

As of today we can also add in NYPD trying to run protesters over.

The problem is a lot deeper and more structural than that single incident - it's decades of police brutality against African-Americans coming to heel.

Basically, the thesis of the protests is that there's no greater crime in a democratic society than the disproportionate misuse of state violence against its own citizens. When a man breaks a window, he violates the law and hurts those around him. When an officer of the law uses disproportionate force, he violates the legitimacy of the law and hurts the entire social contract that keeps society together.

And as I've mentioned several times in this thread, the last part is kind of the key to beating this whole thing. You can't seriously trust your government to protect you from the pandemic when it lets its agents violate your humanity like this, even under the hardships of a lockdown. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of bodies hitting the floor in two weeks' time, but that only drives home the point - people don't go out marching in these numbers in the middle of a deadly pandemic unless they're really desperate for things to change.

Anyway, here's a space dinosaur to lighten things up.

I see where you're all going with this. With a dickwad in chief like Trump in charge, you can hardly blame Americans for this anti-establishment awakening. I feel like November 2020 will be the turning point of the century in both an epidemiological and political level for the US and by extension, the world.

Dedicated OTC thread for the ongoing civil unrest.

No new confirmed cases in Taiwan today.

442 total, 55 domestic, 36 from the fleet, 7 deceased, 423 released.

For your obligatory Indonesia daily update, we have 700 new cases for 26.473 total. Meanwhile, 1.613 have died (+40) and 7.308 (+293) patients have been declared clear of the COVID-19.

Seems like new infection rates in Indonesia are very unstable and change strongly from day to day. Not like Russia where they are fairly stable or Brazil where they are still increasing. Thanks, Bolsonaro.

You don't say, Sep? Blame our equally inconsistent testing and government policies.

In the past couple of weeks, Indonesia ramped up their testing rate to around 10-12k tests a day, but I still think we need to test some 20-30k people a day to get a real clear picture of what the fuck is going on around here.

While I have no doubt Brazil is very high up in the amount of cases, and the methods of its government fucking disgust me... Saying that it has the second highest number of cases is a bit miss leading, since that is by pure numbers.

It is at the time of this post actually 39th by case load per population... officially.... Again I am 99% sure they are fudging there numbers and under-counting, nor would I be surprised if they actually were second or even first there.

If you want to play the raw numbers game the US leads the world in testing 5 times over the 3rd place competitor... Which we all rightfully call out when Trump tries to claim that as dishonest since its inadiqute still.

So please use adjusted numbers, unless we want to conceded testing to him, or be hypocritical... personally I am not a fan of either of those options.

Edited by Imca on May 31st 2020 at 4:52:40 AM

The issue with Brazil isn't so much the total number of cases but rather the rate at which new cases are showing up. The number of new cases per day seems to be rising.

Exactly, which is something worth mentioning on its own.... Or how they have this growth with an exceedingly low test rate...

Or just how some how they have manged to make some one that suggested injecting bleach not be the worst one at handling this.... some how.

Bolsonaro's strategy is to...not do anything about it. His responses have been to brag about being a former athlete, go out for a hot dog, and say "So what?" when asked about people dying of the virus in Brazil.

It's not a coincidence that the countries that seem to be getting hit particularly hard — the USA, Brazil, and Russia — are all led by assholes who don't have much respect for science.

Business Insider: The anti-science leadership of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Putin led to the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world

Edited by M84 on May 31st 2020 at 8:16:53 PM

Lexicon Valley has a Covid-themed episode on language (it is the top one right now).

Some topics:

• The idea that Japanese are less susceptible to the virus because their language is less aspirated (which does not seem to be true, see Spanish and French for example).
• Where the word "isolation" comes from, and how it evolved from "insula" (and of course people complained that "isolation" was a fake word and would never catch on at some point).
• William Henry Pinkney Phyfe's book (deep breath) 18,000 words often mispronounced: a complete hand-book of difficulties in English pronunciation, including an unusually large number of proper names, words and phrases from foreign languages. (Notice the ludicrous implication that you, the reader, are pronouncing 18,000 words wrong.) This is a dictionary of words Phyfe deems often "mispronounced", and he gives you the "correct" pronunciation, of course more often than not ending up saying words in ways that no one really says them at all. It is pretty amusing, provided you can read phonetics. This is basically the worst kind of prescriptive linguistics.
• Why we prefer saying "corona" instead of "covid", and why the backshift from "the coronavirus" to "corona" is inevitable in the same way that no one says "pizza pie" any more. It is also very likely that the common meaning of coronavirus will narrow to refer to this virus specifically. This is the same process that narrowed the meaning of "reduce", which originally could mean either getting smaller or bigger (because you would reduce something to its original size).
• The etymology of "virtual", which turns out to be pretty strange. The meaning narrowed from "manly" to "having an effect" to "having a special effect, an illusion".

Entirely not COVID-related, but as an English teacher in a non English-speaking country, your language is bonkers, and 18,000 seems like a low number to me

Edited by TheLovecraftian on May 31st 2020 at 11:13:12 AM

“English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”

Edited by megaeliz on May 31st 2020 at 10:18:34 AM

"give us your languages!Hand over your Euphemisms and no one gets hurt!"

Not just grammar, either. It pilfers words from many languages, often those it colonized in the past.

Also, it is not so much that English is pronouncing its words wrong, it is that the spelling just doesn't match up with how people are actually speaking any more.

Language appropriation basically.

At least it's not as bad as outright attempts to kill languages, such as the USSR's attempt to erase Hungarian or the CCP's ongoing efforts to erase dialects of Chinese other than Mandarin.

Edited by M84 on May 31st 2020 at 10:25:58 PM

. English is also at it’s core, the unholy offspring of a Germanic root language and French, that was mutated beyond recognition when it underwent a whole period where pronunciation changed dramatically.

Edited by megaeliz on May 31st 2020 at 10:41:23 AM

It's worse than that.

It's the unholy combination of old Celtic grammar, two conflicting German dialects that due to one only partially integrating with the previous grammar before the second lot came along butchered everything into a simplified grammatical hell, a whole heap of old French vocabulary and extra Latin and Greek borrowings, and then with spelling derived from an extra Latin obsession.