quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
Which is why my phone gets left at home now.

Just turn it off.

Been proven time and again Google has work arounds for that and can still fairly accurately track your movement.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
Which is why my phone gets left at home now.

Just turn it off.

Why even care? Someone has to actually LOOK at your movements to decipher what/where etc. Unless you're a career criminal or in the witness protection program, why should you care......

quote:

Originally posted by sigalert:
Denmark and Sweden are running this experiment. Similar cultures and economies. So it will be proven one way or another.

It's interesting to follow the Nordic countries overall, with Sweden as the control group with little government restrictions. Though it's probably too early for a proper comparison, since Sweden has also tested a lot less relative to population size. Per million inhabitants:

Sweden - 5,416 tests, 959 cases, 86 deaths

Norway - 22,720 tests, 1,165 cases, 21 deaths

Denmark - 11,176 tests, 1,005 cases, 43 deaths

Finland - 7,436 tests, 500 cases, 9 deaths

Note that Finland has been hailed as being well-prepared for the crisis, any crisis, due to their decades-long defensive posture towards Russia which they never really gave up. They weren't caught with insufficient stocks of protective gear, for one thing.

On governments exploiting the crisis to introduce general repressive measures, Vice News have a look around the word. It's not a pretty picture, even if you ignore that the article seems to have a bit of an obsession with gay rights in particular.

quote:

These 30 Regimes Are Using Coronavirus to Repress Their Citizens

Dog cages, crackdowns, censorship, surveillance, expanded police powers... Authoritarians are having a moment.

by David Gilbert

Apr 9 2020, 5:34pm

As most governments around the world confront the unprecedented scale of the coronavirus crisis and what they need to do to protect their citizens and economies, dozens of others are seizing on the moment as an opportunity to crack down and consolidate their power.

Authoritarian leaders from Belarus to Venezuela have all looked to take advantage of the outbreak and the ensuing chaos to give themselves extraordinary new powers, while elections get delayed or forced to go ahead, depending on what suits the incumbent rulers. Security forces have been empowered to conduct brutal crackdowns, free speech has been censored, privacy has been eroded.

“Governments around the world, whether they're full-blown authoritarian, like China and Russia, or countries that are on the cusp of becoming less free, places like Hungary and the Philippines, are exploiting the crisis to expand their power and undermine human rights,” Allie Funk, a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, told VICE News. “And as the pandemic gets worse and reaches a bunch of other countries in the global south, [we’ll see] that this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Western countries are also grappling with the need to loosen restrictions on privacy in order to track the spread of coronavirus through surveillance apps that in normal times would be outrageous.

[...]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...press-their-citizens

Don't know where to put this, since it's related, I'll leave it here.

https://www.chicagotribune.com...pfi3i62p4-story.html

Rest In Peace, Cliff.

I'm gonna miss ya! You and that always present grin. Even in a bad mood, you always had that grin. Your son and daughter will turn out to be good Cops, we'll see to that.

Please don't ask how he got the nickname "Sexual Chocolate" that's a secret that only about 20 of the "old school" 005th Dist guys know, and I'll be damned if I'm telling my part in that story. I worked with Cliff years ago back in the "Wild-Wild" and "The Gardens". Good Man and a good Cop.

Caught it while working as a Sgt in Area Central Homicide.

Until Valhalla, my friend.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:
Unless you're a career criminal or in the witness protection program, why should you care......

It's called freedom.
Give a little here, give a little there, pretty soon you'll have none.

Very little resistance is being given to all the nonsense going on around us.
If this whole mess hasn't opened some eyes, nothing will.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:
Why even care? Someone has to actually LOOK at your movements to decipher what/where etc. Unless you're a career criminal or in the witness protection program, why should you care......

I guess you're Okay with the Patriot Act and the sham FISA courts too. You know...'cause it don't affect anyone unless they're career criminals or some such stupidity.

That complacency is exactly how freedom dies. I tried to have a rational discussion with a liberal (is that even possible) about this whole bullshit mess. I was trying to explain that giving up freedom in the "hopes" of safety is a major fallacy. Her retort was that all I cared about were my "freedumbs".....People that think like that are so retarded and I have no use for them in my country. Please don't be like her.

Dang CPD, losing a friend and a good guy sucks RIP Cliff. Sending good thoughts to everyone that knew Cliff.

Not real sure how the state representatives can stop these crazy governors. They can pass all the laws they want but the governor still has to sign them, No? I think the only solution is thru the courts.

I haven't seen any one way aisles in super markets yet around here. They do have tape on the floor at the checkouts and plexiglass between you and the cashiers, that's about it. I was at a store yesterday and not even half the people in there were wearing masks. I didn't see anyone wearing gloves as some have mentioned.

Actually, most of the businesses around here are still open. All of the Farm & Garden stores are open, the hardware stores are open and the big box stores are all open and I saw O'Reillys is open. My daughter was layed off for three weeks but she has been called back to work half days now. She works for a paint and flooring supply company. All the restaurants are closed but some of them have a curb side take-out available the fast food places have a booming drive thru. The wife's pedicure place is closed and she is still in mourning over that.

And now for those who are still interested about the disease itself, a Review article from The Wall Street Journal.

===================================================

The Bats Behind The Pandemic

From Ebola to Covid-19, many of the deadliest diseases to emerge in recent years have the same animal source.

BY MATT RIDLEY

RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.

The scientists were mostly sampling a very similar species with slightly shorter wings, called Rhinolophus sinicus , in a successful search for the origin of the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. That search had alarming implications, which were largely ignored.

In Shitou Cave, south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, they found viruses in the bats’ droppings and anal swabs that were more similar to human SARS than anything found in palm civets, the small mammals that until then were presumed to be the source of human infection. Back in the laboratory, they found that one of the viruses from bat droppings, called WIV1, could thrive in monkey and human cells specially engineered to activate the gene for ACE2 receptors, the lock to which a coronavirus’s spike protein can fit as a key. This suggested that people could catch SARS directly from a bat dropping.

Then in 2016, Ralph Baric and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that the same bat virus could infect live mice that had been engineered to express the human gene for the ACE2 receptor. The virus was “poised for human emergence,” as the title of Dr. Baric’s paper put it.

When Covid-19 broke out, attention focused on pangolins, mammals often called scaly anteaters. Early analyses of the pangolin version of the virus seemed to indicate it was even more closely related to the human version than the RaTG13 bat sample was. The illegal pangolin trade for traditional Chinese medicine brings people into contact with sick animals. Just over a year ago, 21 live Malayan pangolins destined for sale in China were intercepted by anti-smuggling officers in Guangdong. Despite the best efforts of a local wildlife rescue center, 16 died with swollen, flooded lungs, rich in coronaviruses.

The role of pangolins in the spread of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, remains unclear. A closer look at more of the Sars-CoV-2 genome, published last week by Maciej Boni at Penn State University and David Robertson at Glasgow University, together with Chinese and European colleagues, finds that human versions of the virus are more closely related to the RaTG13 horseshoe bat sample from the cave than they are to the known pangolin versions. It is not yet possible to tell whether the virus went from bat to pangolin to people, or from bat to pangolin and bat to people in parallel. Significantly, the same analysis shows that the most recent common ancestor of the human virus and the RaTG13 virus lived at least 40 years ago. So it is unlikely that the cave in Yunnan (a thousand miles from Wuhan) is where the first infection happened or that the culprit bat was taken from that cave to Wuhan to be eaten or experimented on. Rather, it is probable that somewhere much closer to Wuhan, there is another colony of bats carrying the same kind of virus. Unless other evidence emerges, it thus looks like a horrible coincidence that China’s Institute of Virology, a high-security laboratory where human cells were being experimentally infected with bat viruses, happens to be in Wuhan, the origin of today’s pandemic.

Bats are sold in markets and supplied directly to restaurants throughout China and southeast Asia, but no direct evidence of their sale in Wuhan’s wet market has come to light. Also, horseshoe bats, which are much smaller than the tastier fruit bats, are generally not among the species eaten. The significance of the Yunnan cave sample is that it shows the bat virus didn’t need to recombine with viruses in other specome cies in a market to be infectious to people. The role of the wet markets may be that other animals get infected there and produce much higher loads of virus than the bats would, amplifying the infection.

All over Asia and Africa human beings encounter horseshoe bats, any one of which could be carrying a virus that could start an epidemic if amplified in a market or similar setting. Bats have supplied most of the dangerous new diseases of the past two decades. The natural reservoir of rabies is in bats, especially in the Americas. Ebola, Marburg and other highly dangerous viruses from bats, mainly in Africa. The Hendra and Nipah viruses are caught from fruit bats and have caused lethal but small outbreaks in south Asia and Australia. And most coronaviruses seem to originate in bats, including SARS and MERS, a frequently fatal illness that people in the Middle East began catching from camels in 2012, the camels having picked it up from bats.

There are good reasons why bats spread so many viruses. Bats are long-lived mammals, like us, and live in large crowds, like us—ideal for spreading respiratory infections in particular. One bat roost in Texas houses 20 million bats at certain times of year, a concentration of mammals paralleled only by people in cities. There are lots of different species—one-quarter of all mammal species are bats—so they have lots of different viruses. And they fly, carrying diseases long distances, allowing viruses to indulge in “host-shifting” between bat species. This especially suits viruses that can “recombine” with related strains, like coronaviruses.

It is not yet clear why horseshoe bats, in particular, are so infested with coronaviruses. These are average-size bats, distinguished by large, pointed ears and weird little sonar dishes known as nose-leafs, the outer part of which are often shaped like horseshoes. There are at least 100 species, many of which look very alike. Absent from the Americas, they are found all over the tropics of the Old World and in some warm temperate regions. They seem to be fond of living in caves and gathering in large aggregations.

In a paper published in February last year, Patrick Woo and colleagues at Hong Kong University surveyed the coronaviruses found in bats and came to a prescient conclusion: “Bat–animal and bat–human interactions, such as the presence of live bats in wildlife wet markets and restaurants in Southern China, are important for interspecies transmission of [coronaviruses] and may lead to devastating global outbreaks.”

We had fair warning with Ebola, Hendra, Nipah, MERS and SARS, and the Yunnan cave discovery in 2013 should have sounded a loud alarm. Even when this pandemic is over, others are possible. Bats live for up to 30 years and don’t seem to suffer much in the way of symptoms from coronaviruses, so bat number RaTG13 may well still be alive.

Mr. Ridley is a member of the House of Lords and the author of many books, including ”How Innovation Works,” which will be published in May.

LINK

quote:

Originally posted by RAMIUS:
In regard to the vented patients increased rate of death.

(Definitely correct me if I’m wrong with the above statement)

Are they dying because they’re on a vent?

Or are they dying because they have more severe symptoms aka. Got it bad...(which would explain the vent to give them a hand breathing).

This video of another doc in NYC may have ready been posted here, but in case not he theorizes that putting people on ventilator’s at the ‘assumed’ correct settings for similar conditions may actually be causing more harm than good in treating the Chinese Virus.

The video is probably about a week old because the estimated number of deaths that he cites was the ~200K figure.

Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sydell

quote:

Originally posted by RAMIUS:

This is absolutely false.
A virus particle is so small, take a marble and toss it between telephone poles down a country road.
That's how far apart the fibers are to a virus.
Now drop a basket ball into a football stadium. That's how small a virus is to a cell.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
And now for those who are still interested about the disease itself, a Review article from The Wall Street Journal.

===================================================

The Bats Behind The Pandemic


In Shitou Cave, south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, they found viruses in the bats’ droppings and anal swabs

Bat poop and anal swabs from Shitou Cave, eh?

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:

quote:

Originally posted by tleo205:
...This ass Fauci and some others are saying their needs to be a government ID card issued showing "virus free status" and technology to track individuals...

You are already being tracked by your phone's GPS data and that is being used by State and Federal governments to see if people are staying home or not. It's been on the news several times in the form of rankings on what states are doing the best and it is usually cited.

Which is why my phone gets left at home now.

My phone is an flip phone and it stays at home turned off about 99.9% of the time so they can track all they want to if they can. I never understood why so many have to be on a phone all day long wherever they are.

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
Bat poop and anal swabs from Shitou Cave, eh?

What have you been told about paying attention to details?

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
Bat poop and anal swabs from Shitou Cave, eh?

What have you been told about paying attention to details?

And South of Kumming. Is somebody pulling the writer's chain?

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by Excam_Man:

I assume you're not going to pass anyone who is taking their sweet ole time either?

I find it hard to believe we live in a world where we no longer question stupidity.

So what happens if I miss an item while walking one way down an aisle? Can I turn and walk the 8 feet or so back to said missed item? Or must I continue on and go back all the way around down the adjacent aisle so I can start at the beginning again?

No need to answer cause I know exactly what I would do.

I was in one yesterday with the little arrows on the floor. I totally ignored them and will continue to. I try to keep my distance but I refuse to go along with this nonsense.

quote:

Originally posted by ScreamingCockatoo:
This is absolutely false.
A virus particle is so small, take a marble and toss it between telephone poles down a country road.
That's how far apart the fibers are to a virus.

A colleague and I were discussing this the other day. We've long known (or have been told) that the surgical masks we wear in dentistry are fairly useless against viral penetration. Still, we rarely get colds or influenza. Either those masks do better than we are told, the airborne aspect of transmission isn't as easy as we think, or we have incredibly robust immune systems from decades of exposures. Maybe all three.

There was an article in JADA a few years ago that presented a study of N95 vs surgical masks in a hospital setting. The nurses were treating patients with influenza-like illness during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak and were randomly assigned to the mask groups from the end of Sept to early Dec. The difference in infection rates between the two groups was less than 1% and statistically insignificant.

quote:

Originally posted by ScreamingCockatoo:
This is absolutely false.
A virus particle is so small, take a marble and toss it between telephone poles down a country road.
That's how far apart the fibers are to a virus.
Now drop a basket ball into a football stadium. That's how small a virus is to a cell.

Agreed, it's bullshit. The medical masks are not designed to keep stuff out, their designed to keep stuff in.