Moderator notice: Please do not ask for medical advice in this forum!
- If you are interested in Crafting, maybe try ordering a craft kit online (something substantial that would take time would be best, like a Latch hook kit
(and crochet hook if you don’t have one), a potholder loom and cotton loops, or cross stitch kit), to work on.
- learn something physical, like an instrument, how to sew or knit, etc
- a lot of museums and zoos and the like are doing virtual tours or free online classes, so keep an eye out for that as well.
- do a giant puzzle
- Join an online bookclub
- Take an online class
While the outbreak started around New Year's Day (12/31), it's picking up steam around the Asia-Pacific region especially since Mainland Chinese people tend to travel a lot.
For reference, the BNO Newsroom twitter has a special feed for any info on the coronavirus:
https://twitter.com/bnodesk?lang=en
The WHO has page about COVID-19 and any other concerns people may have. I suggest peeps go to the Q&A page to check for official details.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
Edited by nombretomado on Jun 3rd 2020 at 3:21:48 AM
A Self-inflicted Disaster
S.Korea's govrnment officially announced that the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has started. If the Seoul metropolitan area sees more than 200 new cases a day on average, the government will raise social distancing levels to level 2.
As the college entrance exams are upcoming, many students are worried as the exams are serious business in South Korea. The tests have already been delayed once, and nobody wants to see any further disruption to the tests because of COVID-19.
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow
I mean periodic booster shots is still preferable to getting the damn disease in the first place.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Lost in Space
Guess who has COVID-19? Florida governor Rick Scott.
I'd say I wish him well, but I promised to stop lying.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
It's a "reap what you sow" situation.
Disgusted, but not surprised
I thought Florida's governor was DeSantis.
Lost in Space
Deranged X-Mas Figure
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
x4 He's a Senator. Not the Governor.
![[nja]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/user_ninja_2074.png "[nja]"){kind=small}
'd.
Edited by kkhohoho on Nov 20th 2020 at 10:41:29 AM
Doctor Who — Long Way Around: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13536044/1/Doctor-Who-Long-Way-Around
State of Mind
#thoughtsandprayers
He's going to get better medical attention than most people in his state.
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim
Master of Tediousness
Just saw a tweet from my area's sheriff's twitter account saying Gavin Newsom's stay at home orders won't be actively enforced. And people wonder why the pandemic got this bad.
Edited by KZN02 on Nov 20th 2020 at 11:26:05 AM
With a "0", not an "O".
I actually wanted to be Resileaf
Oh, people don't wonder how it got bad. They pretend it hasn't while hundreds of people die.
Master of Tediousness
Copied from the General US Politics Thread.
With a "0", not an "O".
so i made a new avatar
Or they pretend it hasn't as they lay dying from it.
Edited by PhysicalStamina on Nov 20th 2020 at 6:18:24 AM
To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."
Crossposting from the US Politics thread, but Donald Trump Jr. has tested positively for COVID.
Today's COVID-Specific https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2020/11/20/day-1401/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/20/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/
Global: Total confirmed cases: ~57,366,000; deaths: ~1,369,000
U.S.: Total confirmed cases: ~11,855,000; deaths: ~254,000
Source: Johns Hopkins University
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Live Blogs: New York Times / Washington Post / CNBC / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / NBC News / CNN
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/20/world/covid-19-coronavirus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/20/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/20/coronavirus-live-updates.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-19/dc-cases-rise-texas-sees-new-case-record-virus-update?srnd=coronavirus&sref=MIBMEEoj
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/covid-2020-11-20?mod=hp_theme_coronavirus-ribbon
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/2020-11-20-covid-live-updates-n1248338
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-11-20-20-intl/index.html
Pfizer asked the FDA for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine after initial results showed the vaccine was safe and 95% effective. The process is expected to take a few weeks, and an advisory committee meeting to review the vaccine has been tentatively scheduled for early December. Emergency use authorization would allow limited groups of Americans to get the vaccines before the FDA has completed the typical approval process. (New York Times / Stat News / CNBC)
Redmess
Careful about shipping costs, I saw one on Amazon that had 160 dollar shipping fees.
Man, finding a decent reusable mask is kind of a pain, to be honest. Finding one that is the right size, doesn't slip off your nose, and fits comfortably for long periods isn't easy, especially on the internet. The market is full of all sorts of masks of varying quality now, and they are often not refundable.
Edited by Redmess on Nov 20th 2020 at 5:16:26 PM
Optimism is a duty.
In the name of being honest
I just hope that the hospital tech who took Don Jr's nose swab didn't get immediately arrested for cocaine possession.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
I don't know how the media situation is in your country, but here in Italy I wish that everyone would just shut up. Newscasters are reporting about COVID all the time with sensationalist tones, the government starts to sound stupid with their fixation on Christmas at the expense of everything else, and actual scientists are not helping with their constant bickering and inability to speak to the public without sounding either condescending or like harbingers of doom.
The latest "scandal" is that of a professor (a serious one, not a quack) who said that he'll never take the upcoming vaccine because it has been produced in such a short timeframe and therefore is not safe; he later apologized but the damage has been done, now anti-vaxxers and assorted crackpots have more ammunition for their theories. Sure, it's still the press' fault for launching every piece of news in a sensationalist way, but still it baffles me that after almost a year these men of science still haven't learned that talking to their academic circles and talking to the public at large is not the same thing.
"Effective Altruism" is just another bunch of horsesh*t.
In two of the confirmed reinfection cases, it seems that their second reinfection was a case of being a different strain to the first infection. But they had swabs of the original infection to make that comparison, which isn't the case for many people who get COVID — which is also one of the problems with confirming reinfections at all.
I'll see if I can find the links.
On the subject of chicken pox, there was no vaccine when I was a child, so I had a very nasty bout of it. To date, I haven't had it a second time. But... never say never. Due to lack of vaccines, I actually had just about every childhood illness you could think of by the time I was 7, including an experience where doctors initially thought I had lymphoma until biopsies confirmed it was an atypical form of glandular fever that mimics lymphoma. The one vaccine I did have as a baby was BCG.
On the other hand, I had so many infections as a young child that, after the age of 7, I never did miss a day's schooling for sickness ever again.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 21st 2020 at 1:59:23 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
The different strain would also be how they could definitively tell it was a reinfection; otherwise, it would be hard to differentiate between a reinfection and it coming back after not completely clearing it after the first bout.
Redmess
Yeah, I also had the chicken pox. Strange to think that there wasn't a vaccine back in the 90s.
Optimism is a duty.
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
Reuters has an article about the virus' origin in Italy if it came from China or not.
The Italian researchers' findings showed that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed coronavirus antibodies well before February.
If those findings are correct, scientists said it could change the history of the origin of pandemic, raising questions about when and where the virus first emerged.
The novel coronavirus was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December. Italy's first COVID-19 patient was detected on Feb. 21 in a small town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.
The Chinese government said on Tuesday it believed the study showed that tracing the origin of the virus was an ongoing process that may involve many countries.
But the Italian researchers said that's not necessarily their conclusion.
"These findings simply document that the epidemic in China was not detected in time," Giovanni Apolone, scientific director of National Cancer Institute (INT) and a co-author of the study, told a news conference in Milan.
The study has also sparked doubts among some Western scientists who called for further tests.
Much of the scepticism was focused on the so-called specificity of the antibody tests, that, if not perfect, might reveal the presence of antibodies to other diseases.
Emanuele Montomoli, co-author of the study and professor of preventive medicine at the University of Siena, defended the accuracy of the research, saying the tests identified the antibodies by targeting a part of the spike protein called the receptor binding domain (RBD), which is specific to the new coronavirus.
"Subsequently the serum samples were also tested on four different types of coronavirus circulating at that time in Europe and the USA and there were no cross reactions," the scientist told the news conference.
Some scientists also questioned how there could be such a high percentage of samples with COVID-19 antibodies when the virus had been detected in only 2.5% of the Italian population by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat) last spring.
Another author of the study said that the two sets of data were not comparable.
"Our study does not suggest at all that 11% of Italians had COVID antibodies in September-October," said Gabriella Sozzi, Director of Genomics Cancer at INT.
"These were 959 healthy volunteers, heavy smokers or ex-smokers between 55 and 65 years old, mostly males, not a representative sample of Italians," she added.
People keep bringing up chicken pox, doesn't shingles technically count as a second infection? Because you can only get shingles if you've previously had chicken pox.
I had it twice as well.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"