Coronavirus thread

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Username17
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:Do any other countries have gun militia-types arming themselves to demand an end to quarantine
Venezuela. Although the armed militias have somewhat more complex demands.

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DenizenKane
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Post by DenizenKane »

Yeah, I'm so dumb for thinking the virus is fake.

Prove to yourself it's real. Just try. Find the virus, find the statistics. They look like they are there, but they're not. It's all fake. But, you're all sucking on Satan's teet to hard to see it.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Eh, I'm social distancing, I'm staying further than 1.5m from Satan, even if there are teats involved.
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Post by Username17 »

DenizenKane wrote:Yeah, I'm so dumb for thinking the virus is fake.

Prove to yourself it's real. Just try. Find the virus, find the statistics. They look like they are there, but they're not. It's all fake. But, you're all sucking on Satan's teet to hard to see it.
I'm literally a doctor and we've had to move our ward in with the cardiac surgery because of all the COVID patients taking up extra beds and needing extra wards for respiratory patients. There are COVID patients on the other side of the wall I'm leaning against.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

I've heard of people who died of the flu (like Jim Henson), but I've never KNOWN anyone that died of the flu. My wife's great grandmother died in the 1918 pandemic, but nobody we're related to on either side of the family has ever died of the flu in 100+ years.

I know someone who died of Covid-19. It doesn't look like any flu in my lifetime. Of course, if it was 'just flu' but was more deadly and more contagious that would still mean it's bad news.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Our dumbass governor and mayor opened up the parks in my county and immediately had to shut them down due to overcrowding. Pictures in the paper showed that no one had masks on.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by nockermensch »

OgreBattle wrote:Do any other countries have gun militia-types arming themselves to demand an end to quarantine
Brazil does.
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Post by OgreBattle »

nockermensch wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:Do any other countries have gun militia-types arming themselves to demand an end to quarantine
Brazil does.
last I heard it was the crime gangs enforcing quarantine as the president demanded things stay open yeah?

There fights over this
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Post by Stahlseele »

I read rumors about a military take over in brazil because of this as well?
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Our dumbass governor and mayor opened up the parks in my county and immediately had to shut them down due to overcrowding. Pictures in the paper showed that no one had masks on.
I actually went to a park/trail yesterday with a friend of mine. I never knew this before, but sweaty surgical masks are really gross. We only saw a couple other people with masks on, and we were wandering around for about an hour. There were maybe... 50 people, all in all? One of the guys I saw in a mask was a biker, but I guess the people he was biking with thought they could outrun the virus or something.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I think it's pretty clear at this point that Trump is going to go down in history as one of the greatest butchers we've seen -- and if you don't count the lives of non-Americans, comfortably in 1st-place. If you do, he'll probably be a bit behind Truman, Nixon, and/or Reagan.

The thing is, our institutions have broken down so thoroughly that I don't think that any other President would've done better. Even Presidents who would've sworn an oath before God to do whatever they could to stop the spread still would've had their balls in a death-grip by the fascists in Congress and the statehouses. Structurally, I doubt, say, FDR would've done much better than Trump.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Whipstitch »

My sister was tested this morning and I guess they're gonna be shutting down the food processing plant she works at for a while. Here's hoping she doesn't have it, I guess.
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Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I think it's pretty clear at this point that Trump is going to go down in history as one of the greatest butchers we've seen -- and if you don't count the lives of non-Americans, comfortably in 1st-place. If you do, he'll probably be a bit behind Truman, Nixon, and/or Reagan.

The thing is, our institutions have broken down so thoroughly that I don't think that any other President would've done better. Even Presidents who would've sworn an oath before God to do whatever they could to stop the spread still would've had their balls in a death-grip by the fascists in Congress and the statehouses. Structurally, I doubt, say, FDR would've done much better than Trump.
It's impossible to prove what would have been had we been living in the better timeline where Hillary Clinton is in charge and doesn't fold the CDC Pandemic task force and doesn't withdraw the CDC Beijing office. But limiting influx wouldn't have been that hard in the beginning. And with a small number of infected Americans you could keep a few towns under lockdown rather than trying to get a bunch of fucking Iowans to stop licking each others' eyeballs for freedom.
Image
I mean, even without getting any of the intelligence briefings she still tweeted out most of the sane plan off the top of her head while dunking on Donald's flailing.

It's possible that we'd get an outbreak in Florida or Louisiana with no real state level response, followed of course by the governors in question refusing to follow federal guidelines because of the freedom to die for white supremacy or whatever. But with early action this looks a lot more like Obama's ebola outbreak (2 dead) than it does like this shit show (2 dead every 80 seconds).

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Post by Stahlseele »

Why is SWEDEN so bad? O.o
Never mind, i was provided an answer:
https://satwcomic.com/balancing-act
Last edited by Stahlseele on Mon May 04, 2020 11:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

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Post by Maj »

This is the version of the story I read: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/us/michi ... index.html

It's fucking stupid. And the stupid state rep in Ohio. And the pipe bomb dude in Colorado with a source article that tries to make the guy sound insane by mentioning he'd been taking Adderall for years. Fucking lone wolves. They're terrorists!
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:Why is SWEDEN so bad? O.o
Never mind, i was provided an answer:
https://satwcomic.com/balancing-act
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of unknowns about how many people had the infection versus how many people were sick. If you used the most generous assumptions, it was possible that the number of people exposed by not sick was very high. And if that was the case, you could potentially just power through and accept extra dead comparable to a bonus flu season. That was the bet that Sweden and the UK made at the beginning of the crisis.

It takes up to two weeks to develop symptoms and can take up to a month to actually die from it, so the really definitive results that this idea was badly wrong weren't back until the cat was thoroughly out of the bag. Now we have some hard data and New York has lost twenty five thousand people with an overall infection rate of about 1 in 10. And it looks like it won't burn itself out naturally until it hits 80% of the population. So if we just let it do its thing, we're looking at losing over two hundred thousand people in New York alone.

It's not a difficult math problem, but there were a lot of unknowns at the beginning. The UK and Sweden chose to fill in those unknowns with hope instead of caution, and now a lot of people are going to die.

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Post by Blade »

My Swedish friends had this joke about how Swedes already did social distancing in normal times. It's not so funny today. :(
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Post by buddy bradley »

Only high schools and university classes have shut down in Sweden (and I think five or six bars in Stockholm were forced to close for ignoring government, uh. recommendations because I hasten to call them regulations).

The government didn't really have the power to enforce lockdowns in the beginning (that would be considered fascist in Sweden, and only allowed during war time). They have more power to do such things now, but see no reason to so everywhere is open (albeit with less people), no one is wearing masks (you can't wear what you can't get), but the hospitals apparently are coping.

Christ, my first post on this forum I've been reading for ages is about a virus and not a game. May as well mention that I appreciate all the work you guys have done on this site, and that I am particularly fond of the Middle-Earth one, the MERP one to be exact, because that rule book has confounded me for decades now.
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Post by DenizenKane »

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN22G295

How many coincidences does there have to be before it's not anymore?
Last edited by DenizenKane on Tue May 05, 2020 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

I think the number is 'three'?
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

buddy bradley wrote:Christ, my first post on this forum I've been reading for ages is about a virus and not a game. .
Welcome aboard then.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

What even is that Denizen post about? I have no idea what even the point is.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

What is the point of anything he's been posting?
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Post by Whatever »

saithorthepyro wrote:What even is that Denizen post about? I have no idea what even the point is.
That's because he's not making "an argument" since that would be subject to incredibly straightforward refutation. Instead he's making an observation, namely, that one set of tests produced some false positives, and hoping that you'll draw his desired conclusion, which is that the whole thing is fake and we can't trust any numbers from anyone.

Obviously that's a ridiculous claim, and his evidence doesn't come close to supporting it.

That's before we get into a statistical understanding of false positives, or how we go from a limited and in some cases even flawed set of test results, to a model that accounts for why just so many more people are dead and dying this year than we'd expect. Actuarial math is extremely unforgiving when you apply it to large populations, so a spike in deaths cannot be handwaved away.

This is pretty typical for QAnon types. They find some city where the numbers aren't bad yet and hope you'll "realize" that this means they were right all along and it's all a big hoax. Or they point out that the DNC orders pizza sometimes, and this is meant to be "proof" of child sex trafficking. But if you didn't already know what conclusion they were trying to get to, you wouldn't have any way of figuring it out just from the evidence they actually present.
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