Hua Guofang

Religion is the greatest conspiracy theory of them all.

Keen reefs for backyarding

Sent you a DM, Twitter is a great news filter for the issues you're interested in. Start following the people/experts/journalists/etc. that you respect, then follow the people they follow etc and modulate from there. Make sure you follow experts or authoritative people who you disagree with to ensure that you're not just setting up an echo chamber for yourself. I've been doing this for years on a couple of different accounts and I haven't opened a normal news website for years. Here's also a few tips to get around paywalls: Turn the newspage behind the paywall into a PDF and quite often you can get the article in full: https://webpagetopdf.com/ This one is a little hit and miss but is still worth a crack: https://outline.com/

I barely read any particular news anymore. I use twitter to follow the experts in the fields that I need to know about and read what they're reading. This wolf warrior diplomacy is one of the dumbest things ever. The Chinese don't understand that there needs to be a difference between domestic and international propaganda.

Life imitating memes

Tulsi is hot but a bloke who knows things told me the other day that there is nobody in American political life who has so faithfully repeated the Kremlin line that it's impossible not to at least consider that she's been seduced by their message, at best. Although, she is pretty hot. Reckon a weekend with her, AOC and the Finnish PM would be fun. Also, I don't think Trump is solely responsible for more deaths than there should have been but he is the President, he is ultimately responsible for national policy. Sure, he may have been given shit advice, but it's him that chooses to take it from family and sycophants rather than the intelligence community and scientists. So fuck it, he's responsible for those actions, just as we hold Obama responsible for fucking up the response to China in the South China Sea and Bush responsible for invading Iraq, etc. etc. And he's certainly keen to take personal credit for successes, real or imagined. So he can take credit for the failures too. .

In terms of the national stockpile of PPE and other response resources, I have no idea whether the current admin failed or succeeded at preparing properly. However, when it comes to pandemic response, he absolutely is less prepared than other presidents because he disbanded the pandemic response units in the National Security Council, he defunded large amounts of the CDC and he ignored the briefings from the outgoing administration that pandemic was likely the greatest risk the incoming admin would face. Then, of course, he tried to ignore the outbreak calling it a democratic hoax and telling the nation that it would magically disappear. Agreed that trying to smash him in the midst of a national crisis isn't a great approach. However, the king has been shown to be naked, he's faced a real emergency and utterly failed (as he did in stopping DPRK nuke development and a bunch of other stuff he claims wins on), that can't be lost in the lead up to the election. Americans really ought to be aware that the person in charge of running shit isn't a capable leader and is responsible for a pretty large number of Americans dying. All the above stuff about defunding is documented and can be supplied if you want to read about it.

Wuhan's death toll was just revised upward by 50% as well.

A bunch of countries shifted the way they record CV19 related deaths, which meant that a bunch of deaths had to be added to the tally. For example, the UK, apparently hasn't been counting deaths in nursing homes, China wasn't counting asymptomatic infections as..., well, infections! As @misteravenhas been saying, looking at the infection count is a little misleading as it's relative to so many variables such as testing rate, what is recorded as a positive result, etc. etc. Death counts are a little more informative but even then, it's not at all straight forward. I think the smart money just assumes there is more of everything than we are aware of and there's a lot to this particular virus than we yet know and new information may adjust the truth to be that it was less harmful than first thought or that it might have longer-lasting health impacts for the recovered than we were expecting. It's still a bit of a black box. .

Rarely a day that goes by in my adult life where I don't think this at least 852 times. My recent trip to Syd/NEwtown was pretty cool. Given the age of our little girl, I haven't had the chance to go to a pub for 9 months. However, in Syd, wife had her mother with her and a quality pub was 100m away (walking distance). So I was able to get 5 straight nights in with a couple of beers down at the local - good beers too, not megaswill shiite - surfin in the phone, checking out some tail, listening to trivia night. Was spot-fucking-on. Reckon once all this social distancing is in the past I'll be given a pass out to do the same at Old Canberra Inn for an arvo. Looking forward to it.

Butter, whilst brilliant is the most recalcitrant of spreads.

@abrasivesaint- daily localised shortages of PPE are different to retaining stockpiles to be rapidly dispersed to impacted regions during an emergency - especially in an era when we know some organisations have been experimenting with bio-agents as a method of terror attack. Same goes for responses to natural disasters, industrial disasters, etc. The national stockpile is there to be able to surge when needed, like an insurance policy. It's the same as recovery equipment for earthquakes, aerial water-bombers for fires, etc. This stuff doesn't exist for and is likely in short supply for standard car wrecks and house fires, but they don't threaten the national interest or national security like large-scale events. That's what the national stockpile is for and why it's supposed to be managed at a national level. The Aust. govt was caught sleeping on this as well, family members are part of the effort to source PPE internationally.

He's on record calling it a hoax, saying there was nothing to worry about, that it would all magically disappear, etc. Yeah, he fucked it up pretty badly and that's why he's now trying to deflect attention onto the world health organisation (not to say that they don't deserve a kick up the arse, but they aren't responsible for the US President fucking up America's national response, many other countries responded appropriately and don't have infection and death rates anything like the US has). It wasn't just him though, the Mullah's in Iran responded very badly, as did the UK govt. Indonesia is in a whole world of hurt but they have different pressures regarding their response than the US does. Trump disbanded and defunded large areas of the govt set up to deal with pandemics leaving the US less prepared to manage an outbreak and then (allegedly) took bad advice from Kushner who didn't want him to spook the markets in an election year. Thus, it wasn't taken seriously enough until it was a too late to avoid significant impact. It could have been much less severe if earlier action had been taken.

Just because I'm procrastinating from doing work and feeling pedantic, but is this actually correct? Bubonic plague is caused by bacteria, not a virus. As far as I'm aware (which really isn't that far) both are pathogens but one is a single cell micro-organism and the other whereas a virus is a parasite, bacteria create infections and virus create disease and both are treated differently. The 2003 version of SARS is gone, it was 'killed off' by quarantining all those infected until they recovered or died. So maybe that's not 'just going away' but they can be eradicated and they do hang around. H1N1 still exists after 100+ years as there hasn't been a concerted global effort to eradicate it.

@SMdoubleXL- they're hoping to have a vaccine soonish and as your weather warms up the virus theoretically finds it harder to transmit, etc. Also, once you've located the outbreaks you can quarantine those areas off (for example, not all of Wuhan has opened up, areas where a lot of infected people live are still locked down) and thus you isolate the risk and allow others back out with some restrictions in place (such as no gatherings of more than 100 people, etc) and heavy testing regimes. We still expect the virus to exist in society but it won't overwhelm us and the vaccine will arrive some time in the next one to two years. @Kults- there are a lot of countries that are moving to reduce the severity of lockdowns, such as Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, etc. etc. It is happening and there are qualified people that agreed with severe measures because it was a novel virus and no data existed. But now they say they have enough data to be able to do what you're suggesting in that maybe we can modulate our response to ease restrictions in areas with less risk and increase the response in the most vulnerable areas (which mean age, race, geography, weather, etc). Most of this is at discussion stage but some countries are already moving - however, these are countries that had strong initial responses like NZ and Australia and didn't fuck it up like the UK, IRan, US, etc. Those countries still have huge and numerous outbreaks across the whole country that they need to get a better hold on before they can begin relaxing things. Regards the lasting effects, the science still isn't in yet but they are beginning to find carona cells not only the respiratory tract but also liver, heart, etc. I'll try and post links if I come across them again. Point is, though, that there is still a lot about this virus that remains unknown so we must still approach it as high-risk.

Agree with all of the above, especially that some of the 'freaking out' has actually helped blunt the impact of the virus. Of course, I'm not referring to calling the ambo when you cough, but the folk that are just staying home, wearing some kind of mask and doing the distancing stuff. Maybe you're right, @abrasivesaintmaybe peak week has passed, because of the huge response. And agree with @Fist 666, which mirrors some of the convos we had at work when all this started - a lot of the EMA and crisis management folk talked about how the last H1N1 outbreak didn't hit too hard because of all the measures that were put in place. But afterwards there was a lot of doubt in the general public because they saw it all as hype for something that never happened, not that it didn't happen because of the hype. The drawback of a successful response to an outbreak is the complacency it creates for the next outbreak.

You work in a hospital so I'm sure you know this. But it's not all about the death rate of the virus but the way it spreads so rapidly. If 10-20% of cases require treatment and come in a tsunami rather than a tidal wave then the hospitals become overwhelmed, the mortality rate rises as not everyone receives the care they need to recover and the other life-threatening events, such as car accidents, other illnesses, etc. also don't get into ICU because it's over-crowded. Death rates elsewhere increase, not just those related to CV19. Then you have the social reaction to a disease that, all of a sudden, has a 10% mortality rate and all the other ripple effects. If you look at the mortality rate alone outside of the context of capacity to deal with a rapid rise of cases, etc. then you miss a major part of the crisis management picture, which is really what it's about. @SMdoubleXLregards the tik tok clips from hospitals, not all hospitals are being hit equally and not all workers in hospitals are involved in the response. When NYC hospitals were being overwhelmed the NJ hospitals were reporting very few cases. That has now shifted and they are very busy. Yet if you go further west, those hospitals are awaiting the spike seen in NYC and similar cities. The impact isn't comprehensive but rolls like a wave geographically and the lockdowns and social distancing has slowed that roll a lot.

Regards the wet markets, I think there is a bit of confusion over what they are. Wet markets are seafood markets, which aren't responsible for starting diseases like MERS/SARS/H1N1, etc. The problem in China is that these seafood markets also started selling wild animals such as bats, pangolins, civets, etc. They would be kept live in cages, in unsanitary (inhumane) conditions and in close proximity to humans. That's where the pathogens would jump between species and end up in humans. If the markets re-open and only sell seafood, there is no risk. If they again allow the sale of wild animals, then there is risk. SARS in 2003 went from bats to civets to humans. They banned the sale of wild meat after 2003 but for some reason allowed it to come back again. And as with 2003, they also botched the initial response to the outbreak this time too. (as did Iran, Indonesia, the US, the UK, etc. etc...) So it wouldn't surprise me if we started seeing wild animals back in cages in markets in China again, especially in the south in places like Guangzhou, Hainan, etc. But, bottom line in understanding the risk, it's not the wet markets but the wild meat trade that poses the problem.

Most of those pics were taken quite a while back, mate. I just take pics as I go and when they build up to enough for a post or two, I chuck them up. Only the ones of the birds were from today. The green, red and blue bird (Crimson Rosella) seems to be injured, he's been walking around my backyard this afternoon. If he survives the night I'll try and get some animal rescue folk out to take care of him tomorrow.

CBR, usual suspects.