Coronavirus - Doomsday

[Voltaire 4,572]

49 minutes ago, iam90sbaby said:

Yes.

I also know how to reduce the crime rate in the US by 52%, if you're interested 

I have a feeling that to get there from here requires too big of a Thanos-style intermediary step.

[fandandy 3,311]

18 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

Yes. Three provinces away from Wuhan, I use to say that we don't have the virus here yet, but my province has dots on the map now. Hopefully none of the dots are local. The disease seems really popular with old people. My city bills itself as a Florida-style winter retreat for oldsters, as a matter of fact, I was the one they tapped to translate the slogan into English for the city's marketing agency promoting it as a senior community resort location. Hopefully they didn't spend too much of their PR budget in Wuhan.

Hopefully, you didn't mistranslate it to It's a sh!thole!!

What's the reaction like on the ground over there?  Are people panicking?  I assume your city is not quarantined yet?  I read earlier that like close to 90% of China's provinces have at least one case.  

[Djgb13 2,338]

You say Coronavirus 

I say Kung Flu 

[Voltaire 4,572]

6 minutes ago, fandandy said:

Hopefully, you didn't mistranslate it to It's a sh!thole!!

What's the reaction like on the ground over there?  Are people panicking?  I assume your city is not quarantined yet?  I read earlier that like close to 90% of China's provinces have at least one case.  

I dunno. It's only been 3-4 days since I heard of it and I hardly leave the house lately since I'm on vacation. My wife has panicked well enough to cancel out travel plans. My MiL and BiL don't seem too over concerned. It is covered on the news media here, I saw the hazmat suits and the containment area tube communities or whatever on TV. Hopefully this settles down soon before school starts we have to classrooms full of people and we have to start using the buses again.

And China isn't a shithole. Especially those local senior centers I was telling you about, they're really nice. Now I've never been to Florida, let alone a senior resort there, but I really doubt that what we have would be out of place there. I think we probably have BETTER weather generally than Florida with no hurricanes ever, although we also don't have a beach.

[Mookz 1,287]

1 hour ago, Voltaire said:

Yes. Three provinces away from Wuhan, I use to say that we don't have the virus here yet, but my province has dots on the map now. Hopefully none of the dots are local. The disease seems really popular with old people. My city bills itself as a Florida-style winter retreat for oldsters, as a matter of fact, I was the one they tapped to translate the slogan into English for the city's marketing agency promoting it as a senior community resort location. Hopefully they didn't spend too much of their PR budget in Wuhan.

So they went with "A Florida-style winter retreat for oldsters"?  

[fandandy 3,311]

36 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

And China isn't a shithole. Especially those local senior centers I was telling you about, they're really nice. Now I've never been to Florida, let alone a senior resort there, but I really doubt that what we have would be out of place there. I think we probably have BETTER weather generally than Florida with no hurricanes ever, although we also don't have a beach.

It was a joke.  Facebook recently translated Xi's name to Mr. Sh!thole.

[Cdub100 3,417]

42 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

 

And China isn't a shithole.

Yes it is. You've just gone native.

[Voltaire 4,572]

3 hours ago, Mookz said:

So they went with "A Florida-style winter retreat for oldsters"?  

It's : Glorious, Heroic Panzhihua! A Healthy Resort with Sunshine

For the record, I didn't write it, I translated it. If I had written it, it wouldn't sound like a CCP slogan. 'Glory' and 'hero' were what I was given to work with and were mixed in the cake. I changed 'glory' and 'hero' to 'glorious' and 'heroic,' put in the 'a', and shuffled the words around into the order above. They asked if they could cut out the 'a', I said no.

[fandandy 3,311]

Panzhihua, a Glorious, Heroic Sh!thole.  If you don't believe me, ask Mr. Sh!thole himself!  (Insert waving picture of Xi here)

[shorepatrol 1,740]

Another hysteria inducing nothing focking burger to get ratings. NOTHINGBURGER. 

[Voltaire 4,572]

15 minutes ago, fandandy said:

Panzhihua, a Glorious, Heroic Sh!thole.  If you don't believe me, ask Mr. Sh!thole himself!  (Insert waving picture of Xi here)

Stop that. This is a small city promotion by the local government. Xi lives in the overpolluted capital of the overpolluted country. We have less than half the pollution of the rest of China. The weather is great and we actually do get sunshine, you can't say that for a lot of smog-filled cities in China. My apartment (and the senior resort center I told you about) would not be out of place and could provide middle class living anywhere in the world (full disclosure: it doesn't have heat ... but we don't need heat here.)

This really is a nice place to live other than the lack of foreign restaurants and that's improved, we now have two, up from zero four months ago.

[shorepatrol 1,740]

30 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

 

This really is a nice place to live other than the lack of it not being America. 

Glad your good volty

[titans&bucs&bearsohmy! 2,745]

1 hour ago, shorepatrol said:

Another hysteria inducing nothing focking burger to get ratings. NOTHINGBURGER. 

I don't know about that man. 

The commies love to save face. If it was nothing, or even just mildly serious, they would ignore and suppress it.

They have quarantined over 30 million people into their cities. They have closed every movie theatre (over 70, 000) in the country. They are already talking about pushing back the start of school already, which is three weeks away.

Generally the commies underreact, not overreact.

I don't think it's gonna be some apocolyptic scenario, but it could get fairly ugly. 

[Voltaire 4,572]

3 hours ago, titans&bucs&bearsohmy! said:

. They are already talking about pushing back the start of school already, which is three weeks away.

 

I did not know this. 

[titans&bucs&bearsohmy! 2,745]

49 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

I did not know this. 

Just a rumor I heard. Could be a Guangdong province thing. Could be utter bullsh!t. 

Honestly, knowing China like I do, the thought of then planning anything three days in advance, let alone three weeks, makes me skeptical. 

[Voltaire 4,572]

38 minutes ago, titans&bucs&bearsohmy! said:

Just a rumor I heard. Could be a Guangdong province thing. Could be utter bullsh!t. 

Honestly, knowing China like I do, the thought of then planning anything three days in advance, let alone three weeks, makes me skeptical. 

I asked my wife over lunch just now. She says in Wuhan school is already postponed but we don't know of anything that would affect us.

[naomi 347]

Volty and Titans, are you guys seeing any Western media or social media (Twitter particularly) coverage? It seems like there's a number of WeChat videos that have managed to get out, showing pretty bad circumstances. 

I feel for the nurses who've (allegedly at least) been bussed in from not yet overrun areas to help. I don't think volunteering was part of the equation. 

Maybe this impression is from sensational media and social media users, BUT, the impression I'm getting from China is that they've spent precious days foremost concealing info from the world and their citizens.

[naomi 347]

 

[naomi 347]

 

[Voltaire 4,572]

45 minutes ago, naomi said:

Volty and Titans, are you guys seeing any Western media or social media (Twitter particularly) coverage? It seems like there's a number of WeChat videos that have managed to get out, showing pretty bad circumstances. 

I feel for the nurses who've (allegedly at least) been bussed in from not yet overrun areas to help. I don't think volunteering was part of the equation. 

Maybe this impression is from sensational media and social media users, BUT, the impression I'm getting from China is that they've spent precious days foremost concealing info from the world and their citizens.

I don't use social media in China nor Western social media anyway and am not in the habit of following along on Twitter or other platforms. Still, most all of what I do know is from English language news sources outside of China plus whatever my wife shares with me. The Wechat stuff is rough. A lot of angry people making accusations and reporting stories. 

China is going to great lengths now to address the problem, using extraordinary measures, and they seem  rather forthright to me. But that's at this stage where it's out of control. Early on, when it was still containable, the Chinese way of cover your ass, blame the other guy. hope it all blows over, don't get caught focking up, was kicking in and nobody wanted to report bad news up the chain of command.

Really, in China, even if I'm a good doctor seeing my colleague screwing up over there, I'm not likely to report him because the axe that will come down from above will be on our entire department's heads, so best just stay quiet and hope he takes care of it quietly and it all blows over on it's own with nobody the wiser. In the US, it'd be different. "Hey everybody look at this new disease I found!" And then they're applying for research grants and writing up papers to figure out what it is they're dealing with and how to treat it. So this doesn't happen the same way.

[DonS 3,079]

https://postimg.cc/tZfnphMX

 

[Old School 360]

Can you imagine the outrage- and lawsuits- if the USA attempted to quarantine a million people?

This thing emerged and spread during lunar new year- when everything in China shuts down and everyone travels back to their home towns to celebrate. The volume of travel is focking amazing. 

[naomi 347]

1 hour ago, Voltaire said:

China is going to great lengths now to address the problem, using extraordinary measures, and they seem  rather forthright to me. But that's at this stage where it's out of control. Early on, when it was still containable, the Chinese way of cover your ass, blame the other guy. hope it all blows over, don't get caught focking up, was kicking in and nobody wanted to report bad news up the chain of command.

The president (Xi) is now saying it's a "grave" situation.

With the # of deaths that are reported officially, the actions being taken definitely look dramatic in light of it.

So people in the West who are trying to follow this are highly dubious about the official numbers. It must be much worse given the measures. What's your sense there?

I'm thinking it's possible the government reacted in the manner over the first four days or so because they know it was a lab escape. Something they were officially warned about by other nations.

[fandandy 3,311]

Watching the Pistons game and they show the players entering the arena.  D. Rose was wearing a black face mask.  

[fandandy 3,311]

Back in 2019 in Canada, some Chinese nationals working in a level 4 Canadian lab were caught after illegally shipping Ebola and Henipah viruses back to China, to potentially be weaponized.  Not related to this persay but damn it seems kinda stupid to have foreign nationals working in your level 4 labs, and I'm quite certain that our dumbass government allows this to happen here constantly.

[NorthernVike 2,080]

Coronavirus?   That's why I don't drink messican beer.

[fandandy 3,311]

An article from The Scientist in 2015:

Quote

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”

Baric’s study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.

The debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature.

But Baric and others argued the study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.

 

[naomi 347]

Interesting stuff, fandandy.

I was looking into Crispr gene editing several months ago for a work project. A bunch of research scientists at the top of their fields in different nations agreed on a moratorium on using it with human embryos. A Chinese scientist used it on two twin (now) baby girls. It could theoretically make them resistant to something (the gene editor is focusing on) if successful, but it's also very likely to cause ailments that are difficult to predict. That gave me the impression that Chinese are not generally bio ethical when it comes to exciting research. Totally wouldn't surprise me if that lab in Wuhan took Baric's work to a new level.

[Voltaire 4,572]

8 hours ago, naomi said:

The president (Xi) is now saying it's a "grave" situation.

With the # of deaths that are reported officially, the actions being taken definitely look dramatic in light of it.

So people in the West who are trying to follow this are highly dubious about the official numbers. It must be much worse given the measures. What's your sense there?

I'm thinking it's possible the government reacted in the manner over the first four days or so because they know it was a lab escape. Something they were officially warned about by other nations.

I'm taking it pretty seriously as are lots of people with changing holiday plans. Each day now, my wife shares with me two or so new stories she runs across online.

Our province (Sichuan) has 44(+4) confirmed cases while the nearby province of Yunnan has 11(+58) cases. (The 58 suspected number is because an entire train car had been detained/quarantined in Kunming). So, yeah, having been at 0 and 0 for both of those when this news started, the numbers are growing quickly. Wuhan doesn't have enough hospital beds. You have to wonder if any of those 44 in Sichuan are here in Panzhihua.

I don't want to speculate on the lab escape idea. I wouldn't know anything about that. If China was doing this Baric thing, I think this'd be a persuasive argument to get them to stop.

[naomi 347]

You guys should definitely stock up on stuff in case you wind up not wanting to venture out for a couple weeks or more.

This is powerful..

English subtitles available.

 

[fandandy 3,311]

From RT.com this morning:

 

 

1

 

 

 

Quote

Local media has reported about the shortage of basic protective gear, like goggles and masks, in Wuhan, the capital of the central Hubei Province, which has been hit hardest by the outbreak. Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Wang Jiangping said that Hubei needs about 100,000 protective medical suits per day but the factories across the country are making only 30,000 of them daily. 

The authorities have ordered an increase in production and have diverted millions of masks, along with scores of hazmat suits, gloves and goggles, to Wuhan. 

Something to ponder, do you think America even produces this stuff?  I focking highly doubt it.

[lod001 1,239]

This starts festering in the US and I'm gonna start working from home. great excuse.

[fandandy 3,311]

In a SHTF scenario where as a nation are we going to be getting hazmat suits and respirator cartridges and masks and latex gloves?  Do you honestly believe that China would be sending them to us when they can't even produce nearly enough for themselves?  And you just know that our incompetent government has about a one-day supply lying around somewhere, maybe in a warehouse in Puerto Rico.  All because of greed and the love of money.  Destroy our industry over decades and become completely dependent on countries such as China, where an outbreak is the most likely to happen, for the items that we would need to protect ourselves from an outbreak.  Crazy.

[cyclone24 1,816]

I'm all for whatever legislation, law, plague, etc that creates less traffic for me. 

MMMMEEEEEE!!!

[Voltaire 4,572]

As of 14 hours ago, Sichuan province has 44 confirmed cases of the disease and I just found out that none of them are in Panzhihua yet, so that's reassuring. We're staying home as much as possible.

[Cloaca du jour 2,072]

Hmmm...man made by chiner to control population...thats why they are shouting to the world.. plausible deniability..

[RaiderHaters Revenge 3,619]

I made my first meme

https://imgflip.com/i/3na1rf?herp=1580067583147

[lod001 1,239]

Can we get some volunteers to go infect the homeless in all states with this thing and wipe them out?

[Hardcore troubadour 12,808]

I sat behind a Chinese in church this morning. Great. 

[MTSkiBum 1,601]

On 1/21/2020 at 12:54 PM, MTSkiBum said:

1% mortality rate and does not seem that contagious.

I think it is up to 2% mortality and slightly more contagious than originally reported.