Coronavirus thread

[Username17]

In case people actually want to know about the tests, I can go into a bit more detail. The earliest tests are based on polymerase chain reaction. That is, there is a process that will multiply copies of a strand of nucleic acid an arbitrarily large number of times - but only if the strand in question contains the exact sequence of supplied primers. Once sufficiently multiplied, the strands can be run on an electrophoretic gel which will tell you the length of the duplicated strands.

The PCR test essentially can't have a false positive. It literally tells you with absolute certainty if some ribonucleic acid has an exact sequence and an exact length you happen to be looking for. It is totally specific in that literally only the virus you are looking for will have genetic material with the relevant sequence and length. Anything else would be genetically different by definition. And since only the relevant genetic material gets multiplied, it genuinely doesn't matter what or how many other organisms are in the sample. Any amount of the virus will get picked up and any number of healthy cells or other viruses or whatever the fuck won't be picked up at all.

What it can do is provide false negatives. You can take a blood test or a throat swab or whatever and happen to pick up zero copies of the virus. If there's no virus copies in the sample, there's nothing to amplify by PCR. If the virus is newly established, it can be only physically present in part of the body, causing a swab to fail to pick it up and the test to give you a false negative. But a false positive is impossible.

Now PCR is expensive and time consuming. Indirect tests that measure a chemical reaction to the presence of a protein or the reaction of the body's antibodies or whatever can be much faster and cheaper. And depending on how those are set up, may be possible for them to give false positives.

For example, your body will start making antibodies to the Coronavirus once you've been infected and your immune system figures out how to do that. But those antibodies won't disappear when you recover. Further, antibodies may well get prompted by exposures to other Coronaviruses and be cross reactive. In that way a "positive" result could be that you have COVID, but it might show the same result after you've recovered or in the case that you have never had COVID but had a related and less deadly virus.

If someone finds that one of the newer test kits doesn't work, that really doesn't say shit about the original tests, which couldn't give you false positives under any circumstances.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsani ... t-bailout/

[Zaranthan]

Oh, man. The idea that Trump is a plant by left-wingnuts to get red voters to go back to work and die of an engineered super-flu, while the Democrats stay home all summer and then sweep the election warms the cockles of my frozen vampire heart.

[Josh_Kablack]

So if you load up https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6

then click on USA in the left panel, and click on daily cases on the lower right graph, you'll get a pattern that looks like a stock market or google trends chart.

Now, check the dates on the peaks and valleys in that pattern.

What exactly is going on with our case count that we have a local peak of new cases every Friday (save for Good Friday when the local peak was Thursday) and a valley every Monday?

Is it simply that we are not doing as much testing over weekends, or is there some weirder pattern going on here?

[phlapjackage]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05 ... st-leaked/

According to unnamed sources close to the administration who spoke with the AP, the White House has refrained from offering such specifics because different areas of the country have varying levels of disease transmission. Areas with less disease may want to take fewer precautions, for instance.

bolding mine - I mean, here's example #3256135235445 of why this kind of mindset is fucking the US hard.

[Username17]

What exactly is going on with our case count that we have a local peak of new cases every Friday (save for Good Friday when the local peak was Thursday) and a valley every Monday?

Some testing centers aren't open on the weekend and a lot of tests aren't reported the same day. So lots of tests are performed during the week, and those results are reported later in the week.

Reporting follows a similar pattern in the UK. In our hospital, the hospital stays open over the weekend, but all the office staff goes home. Data from new cases tested over the weekend doesn't get reported externally until later in the week.

-Username17

[Iduno]

[OgreBattle]

I'd say the US won over red Vietnam , in the sense that the country is deeply suspicious of all neighbors while seeing the US as a great partner, and you can totally go there with a US passport and party hideously on a modest budget.

The only people who lost were the Vietnamese civilians burned up or fleeing the country or being brutalized in camps after victory. Wealthy Vietnamese and wealthy Americans are definitely doing coke together.

[Kaelik]

A Biden advisor, Natasha Sarin, co-wrote and is now promoting a paper touting the super very good genius solution to the coronavirus of not just giving poor people the money they need to live, but instead giving them the money they need to live then reducing their future social security benefits to account for this.

Remember when everyone was pretending Biden wouldn't cut social security?

She's a protege and co-writer with Larry Summers who Biden also has on his team, because this is what the centrist wing of the democratic party looks like.

Trump's team is also promoting reducing social security in basically the same plan. Love it when Biden and Trump come to the exact same solution to a problem, it's how I know we are definitely going to get a really good outcome.

[MGuy]

Getting goosebumps for all that bipartisanship Biden was promising already.

[Maj]

This is interesting
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/health/f ... index.html


If there is any more to this, I can't help but wonder how long until the two-minutes hate gets directed away from bat-eaters and towards frog eaters.

Wow. If you read the source piece, a dude with no discernible connection to China went to the ER on December 27, after suffering for four days. And he got it from his kid. Which makes it present in France before Christmas.

The BBC published an article today on the timeline with China and what they knew/how they responded, and I can't help but think about the dude in France. Is there any way that China is not actually the point of origin?

[phlapjackage]

This is interesting
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/health/f ... index.html


If there is any more to this, I can't help but wonder how long until the two-minutes hate gets directed away from bat-eaters and towards frog eaters.

Wow. If you read the source piece, a dude with no discernible connection to China went to the ER on December 27, after suffering for four days. And he got it from his kid. Which makes it present in France before Christmas.

The BBC published an article today on the timeline with China and what they knew/how they responded, and I can't help but think about the dude in France. Is there any way that China is not actually the point of origin?

I also saw something awhile ago about California going back and checking deaths in December

[Maj]

I didn't hear about December, but I heard they found a death in January.

I don't know the credibility of this source, or the credibility of the work it claims is being done. Is there anything to this?

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regiona ... in-country

[phlapjackage]

I didn't hear about December, but I heard they found a death in January

It's probably more of a fact-finding or CYA type of thing than anything else:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/news ... o-december

[Koumei]

So every time we laugh at America for having some stupid people*, some part of Australia goes "Let's be like our big brother!" and goes full moron as well. We basically have two states that are hard-hit by the plague: the two states anybody gives a fuck about, with actual populations (New South Wales (ie Sydney) and Victoria (ie Melbourne)). NSW (which, thanks to cruise ships, was the main vector of infection for the entire country) continues to be terrible all the time, so they're looking at their "roadmap to freedom, reopening the gates for more death" plan - even though it pre-emptively ended all public transport, public gatherings, and clubs and dining places some 10-20 years ago. Victoria doesn't have LNP state government and therefore has been trying to manage the situation by listening to medical experts and instituting actual controls to slow the spread of infection.

The federal government has been throwing a fit and bad-mouthing the premier of Victoria, presumably because he's making them look bad by actually doing something and listening to the very experts they refuse to acknowledge. Also because how dare he not go with operation "kill poor people for the good of the economic line graph".

Well anyway, Victoria has now had one of those fuckhead protests, albeit without the guns. But just as much stupidity, and the signs that warn us of Bill Gates, Illuminati, Lucifer Telescope, 5G, Vaccines and so on. No they don't link them together or say why these things are bad, it's just a list of fucking words. Honestly it's amazing they used cardboard signs rather than spraypainting the message on bedsheets and hanging them from an overpass.

We literally had those during the same sex marriage debate.

No mention of the New World Order on these signs either, which is a shame, because I love when Nash, Hall and Hogan are associated with these weird conspiracies.

Long story short, this is the first time I've ever been cheering the Victorian police on while watching them manhandle people - honestly they showed some real restraint there compared to when they get to attack have to handle uni students and such. I never would have thought I'd see them throwing someone down and be fully on their side.

*yes I am aware it's a small number of people. That's why I said "for having some stupid people", not "for being stupid".

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, I don't mind stupid Australians so much, but do we have to copy American stupidity? C'mon, lots of stupid things to do involving dangerous wildlife, and if I squint my brain hard enough it almost looks like reckless bravery.

[deaddmwalking]

Is there any way that China is not actually the point of origin?

Yes, but probably not a lot. First off, if the virus exists in the wild (ie, among Pangolins and/or perhaps more importantly bats), there is a chance that it can transmit to humans any time that animal and a human get too close together. This is why Ebola has never been eradicated - even if there are no humans with the disease right now, there's a monkey or a bat or SOMETHING that has ebola just waiting to transmit it, so it'll come back again, and again, and again.

Contrast that with Smallpox which we think only infected humans; when we finally got to the point that no humans had the disease it was really gone, hopefully forever.

Whether China was the origin of the disease or not is really not important - a disease LIKE THIS would have come eventually from SOMEWHERE. With China and India each having 1 billion people, they each had the greatest odds of being the source, but it could just as easily have been the United States - in fact, there is some evidence that the 1918 'Spanish' Flu originated in the United States.

But let's say that the virus did start in China, and that the United States sues them for 'all the economic damage', they can't and won't pay and ultimately it means that the NEXT pandemic everyone is going to hide their cases and it's going to be worse. Defeating the disease means sharing information and while we could fault China's response as insufficient, holding them accountable for the disease simply encourages that behavior.

[maglag]

Once upon a virus...

[OgreBattle]

https://www.theonion.com/light-em-up-bo ... 1843321071

Classic Onion

[Kaelik]

In the last week alex jones finally got to telling us that Tanzania proves the virus doesn't exist.

[Kaelik]

The Dems new coronavirus response bill that, to be fair, will probably never be passed because they purposefully gave up all their leverage for people in the first set of bills bailing out companies, is really bad.

In addition to rejecting a bunch of pretty good stuff because the chair of the progressive caucus asked for it and Pelosi hates them so she said they cost too much, it also classifies every single non-profit in the country as a small business and puts them competing with small businesses for PPP funds. This by the way includes such luminary small non profits as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and literally every single lobbying organization in the country.

"A carve out of 25% of the existing funds on the date of the enactment solely for the use of all nonprofits, no matter their size or type but requiring that at least half this amount go to small non profits under the 500 employee threshhold."

Virtually all trade associations (99.9%) have less than 500 employees - even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, per its 2018 tax return. (3/5)

[Josh_Kablack]

In the last week alex jones finally got to telling us that Tanzania proves the virus doesn't exist.

That's out of character for him, considering how much money he could make by peddling shielded sweatpants that prevent all those 5G Towers from ruining your Purity of Essence and such.

[Kaelik]

That's out of character for him, considering how much money he could make by peddling shielded sweatpants that prevent all those 5G Towers from ruining your Purity of Essence and such.

Well he did only get to this point after spending many months shilling storeable food because the pandemic was going to kill everyone and shut down the country and then also silver in the mouthwash because silver helps kill germs and then the real red pill which has zinc because the way xiaquinie or whatever that Trump was promoting works by pushing zinc into the cells so push zinc into your cells with the real red pill.

He even got a letter from the AG telling him to stop promoting the silver mouthwash because he was basically saying directly that it prevents Covid transmission and therefore was violating even the extremely lax basically non existent EPA rules for marketing supplements.

This is him finally transitioning to the final point on the Alex Jones Timeline, the False Flag Hoax part, which you will also remember from Sandy Hook and the Boston Bombing.

[OgreBattle]

Has the response from red commie European socialists been noticeably better than the USA's?

Like the Viking countries, Germany, France, what are they up to

[Omegonthesane]

Most of Europe kind of didn't do close to enough. There was a tweet I don't care enough to dig out, pointing out that while Germany is a success story compared to the UK or USA, it is a total fucking failure compared to Vietnam who were operating on a thousandth of their GDP with a somewhat larger population.

But yes, despite being an embarrassment to Europe, the Covid response in most of Europe is also an embarrassment to the USA.