Coronavirus Thread VI: Are We Nearly There Yet? (READ OP)

[San Lumen]

It's perfectly relevant to your question. Those things just wouldn't happen and we'd be better off for it.

Well, in an ideal world we'd take a que from Yugoslavia like Austria-Bohemia-Hungary said and just force people to get vaccinated, at gunpoint if need be. Anti-vax bullshit is a direct threat to national security and should be countered as such.

The thing we ought've learned from 1972 Yugo tbh is that it's hard to agitate for antivax when there's an unsympathetic man at your hotel room door shouldering an AK.

That's not going to fly in any western nation nor will they ever do something like that.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

The thing we ought've learned from 1972 Yugo tbh is that it's hard to agitate for antivax when there's an unsympathetic man at your hotel room door shouldering an AK.

That's not going to fly in any western nation nor will they ever do something like that.

Then civilisation dies when the next big one comes. One where one in five dies.

[San Lumen]

A lot of people would not be very happy with that. We would not be better off. I guess large festivals wouldn't happen either.

Forcing people at gunpoint to take a vaccine is unacceptable and dictatorial and western nation that tried something like that would lose any and all respect along with much of their support and would very likely be voted out next election.

Elections shouldn't exist past a certain level tbqh. On a smaller, local level it makes sense and is arguably even one of the best systems, but it ceases to be efficient on a national scale and as shown by our own nation in the recent past is incredibly prone to being hijacked by misled or poorly educated voters who can take the world down with them.

What level should they stop at and who should be choosing them? If you are citizen, of the age of majority and you're not incarcerated you have a right to vote. There are no ifs ands or buts.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Elections shouldn't exist past a certain level tbqh. On a smaller, local level it makes sense and is arguably even one of the best systems, but it ceases to be efficient on a national scale and as shown by our own nation in the recent past is incredibly prone to being hijacked by misled or poorly educated voters who can take the world down with them.

What level should they stop at and who should be choosing them? If you are citizen, of the age of majority and you're not incarcerated you have a right to vote. There are no ifs ands or buts.

Anything above the town or county level really. Beyond that we should have a single party state. Maybe then we could have actually saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and had an actual response to this shit.

[San Lumen]

What level should they stop at and who should be choosing them? If you are citizen, of the age of majority and you're not incarcerated you have a right to vote. There are no ifs ands or buts.

Anything above the town or county level really. Beyond that we should have a single party state. Maybe then we could have actually saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and had an actual response to this shit.

so no elected legislature, statewide officials, national legislature or president? We instead have a rubber stamp legislature that has no real power? I'll pass.

[Vassenor]

The thing we ought've learned from 1972 Yugo tbh is that it's hard to agitate for antivax when there's an unsympathetic man at your hotel room door shouldering an AK.

This is why we the people should be the best armed.

All this because of a vaccine? Get some goddamn perspective.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

This is why we the people should be the best armed.

All this because of a vaccine? Get some goddamn perspective.

Daily reminder that while the 1972 outbreak was going on for the two months it lasted... 1 in five died. Horribly. The first one so horribly (haemorrhagic smallpox) I consider his variant of smallpox the prime counterargument against antivax propaganda.
So what price is "freedom" worth? 1 billion people out of 8?

[Kowani]

India surges past 18 million infections, with yet another day of daily records

India’s total COVID-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday after another world record number of daily infections, as gravediggers worked around the clock to bury victims and hundreds more were cremated in makeshift pyres in parks and parking lots. India reported 379,257 new infections and 3,645 new deaths on Thursday, health ministry data showed, the highest number of fatalities in a single day since the start of the pandemic.

The world’s second most populous nation is in deep crisis, with hospitals and morgues overwhelmed.

Mumbai gravedigger Sayyed Munir Kamruddin, 52, said he and his colleagues were working non-stop to bury victims.

“I’m not scared of COVID, I’ve worked with courage. It’s all about courage, not about fear,” he said. “This is our only job. Getting the body, removing it from the ambulance, and then burying it.”

Each day, thousands of Indians search frantically for hospital beds and life-saving oxygen for sick relatives, using social media apps and personal contacts. Hospital beds that become available, especially in intensive care units (ICUs), are snapped up in minutes. “The ferocity of the second wave took everyone by surprise,” K. VijayRaghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government, was quoted as saying in the Indian Express newspaper.

“While we were all aware of second waves in other countries, we had vaccines at hand, and no indications from modelling exercises suggested the scale of the surge.”

India’s military has begun moving key supplies, such as oxygen, across the nation and will open its healthcare facilities to civilians.

The oxygen crisis is expected to ease by mid-May, a top industry executive told Reuters, with output rising by 25% and transport systems ready to cope.

“My expectation is that by the middle of May we will definitely have the transport infrastructure in place that allows us to service this demand across the country,” said Moloy Banerjee of Linde Plc, India’s biggest oxygen producer.
Hotels and railway coaches have been converted into critical care facilities to make up for the shortage of hospital beds.

India’s best hope is to vaccinate its vast population, experts say, and on Wednesday it opened registration for all above the age of 18 to receive shots from Saturday.

But although it is the world’s biggest producer of vaccines, India does not have the stocks for the estimated 800 million now eligible.

Many who tried to sign up for vaccination said they failed, complaining on social media of being unable to get a slot or even to simply get on the website, as it repeatedly crashed.

“Statistics indicate that far from crashing or performing slowly, the system is performing without any glitches,” the government said on Wednesday.

More than 8 million people had registered, it said, but it was not immediately clear how many had got slots.

A local official in Mumbai said the city had paused its vaccination drive for three days as supplies were running short, while officials said the worst-hit state of Maharashtra was likely to extend strict coronavirus curbs by another two weeks. Only about 9% of India’s population of about 1.4 billion has received a dose since the vaccination campaign began in January.

However, while the second wave overwhelms the health system, the official death rate is below that of Brazil and the United States.India has reported 147.2 deaths per million, the Reuters global COVID-19 tracker shows, while Brazil and the United States reported figures of 1,800 and 1,700 respectively.

However, medical experts believe India’s true COVID-19 numbers may be five to 10 times greater than the official tally.

At Delhi’s Holy Family Hospital, patients arrived in ambulances and private vehicles, some gasping for air as their oxygen cylinders ran out. In the ICU, patients lay on trolleys between beds.

“Someone that should be in the ICU is being treated in the wards,” Dr Sumit Ray, head of the unit, told Reuters.

“We are completely full. The doctors and nurses are demoralised, they know they can do better, but they just don’t have the time. No one takes a break.”

[Esalia]

What's your reason?

I have no fucking idea what’s in it, what it really does and why. Can’t really say too much or I’ll be spreading “MuH MiSiNfOrMaTiOn DuUuDe.”

Fun fact: you will have no fucking idea what's in plenty of things that you put in your body, unless you have tools and patience to check.

If you're this worried over the Covid vaccine, may God help you when you next decide to eat.

[Post War America]

Anything above the town or county level really. Beyond that we should have a single party state. Maybe then we could have actually saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and had an actual response to this shit.

so no elected legislature, statewide officials, national legislature or president? We instead have a rubber stamp legislature that has no real power? I'll pass.

I mean, you'd be back out shopping with friends in a single party state, Vietnam crushed the disease, and even China's back to normal despite being the epicenter of the original outbreak (and they'd have to be underreporting by a factor of 50 to be doing worse than the US in terms of raw numbers, and about 250 times worse to match the US per capita). The lack of political discourse was almost doubtlessly was a help with that as you didn't have antivaxxers protesting every single measure to contain the threat.

[San Lumen]

so no elected legislature, statewide officials, national legislature or president? We instead have a rubber stamp legislature that has no real power? I'll pass.

I mean, you'd be back out shopping with friends in a single party state, Vietnam crushed the disease, and even China's back to normal despite being the epicenter of the original outbreak (and they'd have to be underreporting by a factor of 50 to be doing worse than the US in terms of raw numbers, and about 250 times worse to match the US per capita). The lack of political discourse was almost doubtlessly was a help with that as you didn't have antivaxxers protesting every single measure to contain the threat.

That's not a reason to end democracy. I fear what single party state would do in the US. By the time I go to my first comic con in October Im almost certain there will be no more masks or distancing.

[Post War America]

I mean, you'd be back out shopping with friends in a single party state, Vietnam crushed the disease, and even China's back to normal despite being the epicenter of the original outbreak (and they'd have to be underreporting by a factor of 50 to be doing worse than the US in terms of raw numbers, and about 250 times worse to match the US per capita). The lack of political discourse was almost doubtlessly was a help with that as you didn't have antivaxxers protesting every single measure to contain the threat.

That's not a reason to end democracy. I fear what single party state would do in the US. By the time I go to my first comic con in October Im almost certain there will be no more masks or distancing.

If a state can't protect its own citizens from a Pandemic, it has failed. If a liberal democracy actively made the problem worse with "free" discourse being utilized to undermine efforts to contain the disease, liberal has failed in that state. As much as I tend to be skeptical of authoritarianism, liberal democracies the world over have, with few exceptions, consistently failed to counter misinformation, and their people are suffering as a result. As much as tired as I am of the ongoing pandemic, and as much as I'd like to wish it will be mostly over by October, the high possibility India, or Brazil, or any other country with widespread community transmission creates a vaccine resistant strain of the virus makes it increasingly unlikely that Corona won't, at the barest minimum be an endemic problem humanity will be stuck with till the end of its existence, and unfortunately a lot of that has had to do with the fact that liberal democracies were more concerned with "muh free speech", and made crowd pleasing but disastrous re-openings that have only extended the pandemic instead of doing what we should have done from the get-go; nationwide martial law and quarantines until such a time as the virus was safely contained.

[Nakena]

so no elected legislature, statewide officials, national legislature or president? We instead have a rubber stamp legislature that has no real power? I'll pass.

I mean, you'd be back out shopping with friends in a single party state, Vietnam crushed the disease, and even China's back to normal despite being the epicenter of the original outbreak (and they'd have to be underreporting by a factor of 50 to be doing worse than the US in terms of raw numbers, and about 250 times worse to match the US per capita). The lack of political discourse was almost doubtlessly was a help with that as you didn't have antivaxxers protesting every single measure to contain the threat.

No western governments could have as well simply ignored anti-vaxxer and denialist protests. It's just that the political establishment is either horribly afraid of those people or in league with them.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_Riots

[Ah General Kenobi]

It's perfectly relevant to your question. Those things just wouldn't happen and we'd be better off for it.

Well, in an ideal world we'd take a que from Yugoslavia like Austria-Bohemia-Hungary said and just force people to get vaccinated, at gunpoint if need be. Anti-vax bullshit is a direct threat to national security and should be countered as such.

A lot of people would not be very happy with that. We would not be better off. I guess large festivals wouldn't happen either.

Forcing people at gunpoint to take a vaccine is unacceptable and dictatorial and western nation that tried something like that would lose any and all respect along with much of their support and would very likely be voted out next election.

why wouldnt large festivals happen lol just force the people to live in special communities or something jesus thats what every other civilization has done

[Shazbotdom]

i hope pvt businesses will be allowed to discriminate against antivaxxers

I hope people who believe in fundamental right to not be injected by the System’s mystery cocktail are allowed to destroy said pvt businesses.

And if you tried that at a business that I work at, you'll be seeing the inside of Orleans Parish Prison within a week.

[Nakena]

If a state can't protect its own citizens from a Pandemic, it has failed. If a liberal democracy actively made the problem worse with "free" discourse being utilized to undermine efforts to contain the disease, liberal has failed in that state. As much as I tend to be skeptical of authoritarianism, liberal democracies the world over have, with few exceptions, consistently failed to counter misinformation, and their people are suffering as a result.

I am very much and wholeheartly agreeing with you here. Which being said the Republic of China (Taiwan), Australia, New Zealand and South Korea (?) and to a lesser extend Mongolia (of all places) managed to keep the pandemic pretty much in check through stringent and harsh measures and not messing around with it like many european countries and not to mentiont he US did.

As much as tired as I am of the ongoing pandemic, and as much as I'd like to wish it will be mostly over by October, the high possibility India, or Brazil, or any other country with widespread community transmission creates a vaccine resistant strain of the virus makes it increasingly unlikely that Corona won't, at the barest minimum be an endemic problem humanity will be stuck with till the end of its existence, and unfortunately a lot of that has had to do with the fact that liberal democracies were more concerned with "muh free speech", and made crowd pleasing but disastrous re-openings that have only extended the pandemic instead of doing what we should have done from the get-go; nationwide martial law and quarantines until such a time as the virus was safely contained.

I am not as pessimistic as you are since for example the the BioNTech vaccine can be modified within six weeks to deal with almost any mutation of the virus should this become necessary. In the end the failure of many liberal democracies to deal with this pandemic has to do with the failure and cowardice of their political leadership, who did let itself become hostage of media hysteria cycles and fear of a vocal minorities, or worse actively participated in such to make it all the worse.

[North Washington Republic]

I don’t think the government should force someone to get the COVID vaccine, however I think that those that are voluntarily unvaccinated(which includes those that object to religious reasons) should be put at the bottom of the queue for treatment to illness related to COVID.

[Post War America]

I am very much and wholeheartly agreeing with you here. Which being said the Republic of China (Taiwan), Australia, New Zealand and South Korea (?) and to a lesser extend Mongolia (of all places) managed to keep the pandemic pretty much in check through stringent and harsh measures and not messing around with it like many european countries and not to mentiont he US did.

I won't argue with those points, though it is worth noting that most of those countries are island nations, or in the case of South Korea, effectively island nations as well, and Mongolia I think is sparsely populated enough to have an advantage. That being said yes, they did also contain the virus fairly well as well.

I am not as pessimistic as you are since for example the the BioNTech vaccine can be modified within six weeks to deal with almost any mutation of the virus should this become necessary. In the end the failure of many liberal democracies to deal with this pandemic has to do with the failure and cowardice of their political leadership, who did let itself become hostage of media hysteria cycles and fear of a vocal minorities, or worse actively participated in such to make it all the worse.

I am hoping for the best myself; but I have come to expect the worst possible outcome given how colossally we fucked up the virus response. I can only hope a worse virus doesn't roll around soon.

[San Lumen]

A lot of people would not be very happy with that. We would not be better off. I guess large festivals wouldn't happen either.

Forcing people at gunpoint to take a vaccine is unacceptable and dictatorial and western nation that tried something like that would lose any and all respect along with much of their support and would very likely be voted out next election.

why wouldnt large festivals happen lol just force the people to live in special communities or something jesus thats what every other civilization has done

You can't be serious. You want to create segregated communities for those who refuse to get the vaccine? I cannot and will not endorse an apartheid. That's what your advocating for.

[Post War America]

why wouldnt large festivals happen lol just force the people to live in special communities or something jesus thats what every other civilization has done

You can't be serious. You want to create segregated communities for those who refuse to get the vaccine? I cannot and will not endorse an apartheid. That's what your advocating for.

There's racial apartheid, and there's separating actively dangerous communities on account of their honestly held political beliefs. This is the latter. Herd immunity literally requires a certain percentage of the population to get the shots, and a certain percentage of people can't get vaccinated; since children under 16 are part of that number most countries already can't vaccinate something like 20% of the population already; which puts us dangerously close to the threshold of not making herd immunity.

[San Lumen]

You can't be serious. You want to create segregated communities for those who refuse to get the vaccine? I cannot and will not endorse an apartheid. That's what your advocating for.

There's racial apartheid, and there's separating actively dangerous communities on account of their honestly held political beliefs. This is the latter. Herd immunity literally requires a certain percentage of the population to get the shots, and a certain percentage of people can't get vaccinated; since children under 16 are part of that number most countries already can't vaccinate something like 20% of the population already; which puts us dangerously close to the threshold of not making herd immunity.

so you segregate up to 30 percent of the population away from society? That's not feasible nor practical.

[Washington Resistance Army]

why wouldnt large festivals happen lol just force the people to live in special communities or something jesus thats what every other civilization has done

You can't be serious. You want to create segregated communities for those who refuse to get the vaccine? I cannot and will not endorse an apartheid. That's what your advocating for.

We already segregate dangerous people. It's literally why prisons exist.

[Kowani]

Covid-19 death toll in Brazil has surpassed 400,000 people

Brazil's death toll in the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 400,000 Thursday, as the country struggled to secure enough vaccines and the Senate investigated whether President Jair Bolsonaro's government has exacerbated the crisis.

The health ministry reported 3,001 Covid-19 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing Brazil's overall toll to 401,186 -- second only to the United States.

With 212 million people, the South American giant also has one of the highest mortality rates in the pandemic, at 189 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants -- the worst in the Americas and one of the top 15 worldwide.

Brazil has been devastated by a surge in cases since the start of the year that pushed hospitals to the brink of collapse in many areas.

Although it appears to have passed the peak of the new wave, the number of daily deaths remains staggeringly high, at an average of 2,526 over the past week, behind only India.

Experts blame the latest surge partly on the "Brazil variant" of the virus, a mutation that emerged in or around the Amazon rainforest city of Manaus in December.

Known as P1, it can reinfect people who have had the original strain of the virus, and may be more contagious.

"P1 has had a very big impact. Nothing was done to contain the variant when there was a spike in January in Manaus. It was only a matter of time before it swept across Brazil," said epidemiologist Ethel Maciel of Espirito Santo Federal University.

P1 is now circulating in 54 countries, according to the World Health Organization, which labels it a "variant of concern," along with the so-called British and South African strains. The country is meanwhile struggling with vaccine shortages.

Around 28 million people in Brazil have received a first Covid-19 vaccine dose, just over 13 percent of the population.

About 12.7 million have received a second.

But cities in 14 of Brazil's 27 states have had to suspend second doses because of shortages, according to TV Globo.

In a bit of good news, the first million doses of the Pfizer vaccine were due to arrive Thursday evening, adding to Brazil's two current options, the AstraZeneca vaccine and Chinese-developed CoronaVac.

On Tuesday, the Senate opened an investigation into whether there was criminal neglect in the Bolsonaro administration's handling of the pandemic.

The far-right president has controversially downplayed the virus, fought stay-at-home measures to contain it and rejected offers of various vaccines -- including, initially, Pfizer's.

Bolsonaro defended his handling of the pandemic as the commission opened, telling supporters: "I was wrong about nothing."

The president argues the economic damage of measures such as a national lockdown would cause more suffering than the virus itself.

But the commission's rapporteur vowed to hold officials accountable for mishandling the crisis.

Senators will be investigating, among other things, horrific scenes such as those that unfolded earlier this year in Manaus, where dozens of Covid-19 patients suffocated to death due to oxygen shortages.

"The country has the right to know who contributed to these thousands of deaths, and they must be punished immediately," said the rapporteur, Senator Renan Calheiros.

"There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity... We will wage a crusade against this agenda of death."

[North Washington Republic]

You can't be serious. You want to create segregated communities for those who refuse to get the vaccine? I cannot and will not endorse an apartheid. That's what your advocating for.

We already segregate dangerous people. It's literally why prisons exist.

Many anti-vaxxers are also gun nuts.Literally segregating them will lead to the civil war that they’re so thirsty for. It’s better to implement so-called “vaccine passports. Have it be difficult to be voluntarily unvaccinated.

[Post War America]

There's racial apartheid, and there's separating actively dangerous communities on account of their honestly held political beliefs. This is the latter. Herd immunity literally requires a certain percentage of the population to get the shots, and a certain percentage of people can't get vaccinated; since children under 16 are part of that number most countries already can't vaccinate something like 20% of the population already; which puts us dangerously close to the threshold of not making herd immunity.

so you segregate up to 30 percent of the population away from society? That's not feasible nor practical.

Its an extreme measure to be sure, but you also seem opposed to even the frankly reasonable system of vaccine passports to have a public life, and the line has to be drawn somewhere; if the "freedom" to continue willfully spread a dangerous virus is upheld, the pandemic will never end, so we need to do something.