Fantastic news

"ImmoralMinority" (araimondo) 06/08/2020 at 21:18 • Filed to: None

3

17

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > ImmoralMinority 06/08/2020 at 21:23

0

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing.

MM54 > ImmoralMinority 06/08/2020 at 21:40

10

I’m not one to comment on this sort of thing here (Oppo is for cars to me) but has this whole thing given anyone else a total of zero confidence in the WHO/CDC? I get that you want to err on the side of caution, but between orders of magnitude overestimating the mortality rate, flip-flopping more than an ihop kitchen on if masks do anything, and now going from “you can be spreading it for weeks and never know!” to asymptomatic transmission being very rare, it’s a bit ridiculous.

Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com > MM54 06/08/2020 at 21:54

1

I was going to post a hot take in Jeeps post a few hours ago about how I think The WHO are a bunch of useless twits that royally fucked up starting around mid January (before then it was the goofs in China).

First it was “T here is no pandemic and nothing to worry about, ignore Taiwan everything is under control in Wuhan ” , then magically it was a declared a pandemic a week later “S mall countries might not cope” , then a week or 2 after when Italy blew up they whined and said no one listened to their warnings projecting like they’d been saying it has been a pandemic for months and months . Tedros should get shit canned.

ranwhenparked > MM54 06/08/2020 at 21:57

1

Well, they’re being led by a guy with a track record of helping his government cover up cholera outbreaks, is it much wonder that they’ve lost a bit of credibility? 

DipodomysDeserti > MM54 06/08/2020 at 21:58

3

I haven’t lost faith in them. However, I never had faith in the American public to properly interpret epidemiological data and suggestions, so I wasn’t really surprised by our response, especially during an election year.

Science, especially biological sciences, is all about probabilities. Also, viruses “evolve” very quickly, so you never know what you’re going to end up with.

Svend > ImmoralMinority 06/08/2020 at 22:04

2

Ye’, my step-father tested positive in late March when he went in hospital after a bad reaction to pain meds, he still tested positive (asymptomatic) when they discharged him on the 8th of April and I went into isolation for two weeks with him.

After getting discharged last Thursday after returning to hospital for a week, because his gall stones flaired up, he’s still testing positive (asymptomatic) according to the health visitor that comes to check his gall bladder drain (thankfully it’s not a pee bag like my step-father first explained it to be).

I’ve not been tested myself but haven’t had any symptoms or had anyone I work with come out with any. 

I understand the WHO going back and forth, as there’s so many variables that seem to be affecting different countries differently depending on their cultures, population density, general health, healthcare systems, government reaction and response, etc...

themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles > MM54 06/08/2020 at 22:05

2

The worst group to be a part of is a pandemic research team. Because no matter what news there is to share, you are the messenger. Yes, it’s world changing news that asymptomatic carriers were not causing the same spread we feared could/would happen, but to act as if they should be held in some form of contempt or disregard is but one side of the coin. Had we not gone through with these measures and then the WHO/CDC comes out and goes “Whoops, our bad guys, we should’ve been avoiding each other this whole time” then you’d also, rightfully, be a bit upset.

I’d type everything out, but I can sum up all my thoughts in just two action items.

1) The various researchers and scientists around the world depend on data from other countries. While I’d handle it with more tact than our dear glorious leader, there is a point to be made that China lied or hid their numbers. Or refused to admit they were struggling and needed some help. Also, the lack of a unified response from other countries didn’t help. That needs to change.

2) While the exact number has yet to be determined, over 100,000 Am ericans are dead, so this damn well better spur some reviews and a formalization of policy in the wake of novel infectious diseases. Coupe that with the billions of lost revenue and disruption of lives and the pain that that caused that may have been avoided or lessened had better actions been taken earlier. This should/might result in charges pressed against some people. 

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > MM54 06/08/2020 at 22:07

6

IMO peopl e are being too hard on the WHO. Nobody knew a damn thing about this virus 9 months ago, and medical research time runs a hell of a lot slower than internet time. Given that WHO are just an information aggregator and asses sor not a research organisation, the best they ’re ever going to be able to do is give a summary of any developing consensus. As researchers learn shit, that consensus cha n ges - anyone in the field can tell you a lot of the initial assumptions about how it behaves were wrong. Plus various people publish BS information f or various reasons (and not just China) - ideally WHO should be capable of identifying this, but that’s easy to say from the couch, and in any cae identifying it doesn’t magically turn BS into quality information . WHO have their political problems, for sure, but beating them up over not doing the impossible is unfair.

CDC’s another story - they ARE a research organisation and should be in a position to get better access to the unvarnished findings of other US researchers than the WHO . OTOH it appears they’ve been deliberately crippled, so again: not necessarily their fault.

RPM esq. > MM54 06/08/2020 at 22:33

3

Turns out that epidemiological research into an entirely new disease is hard and takes time. Imagine.

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > ImmoralMinority 06/08/2020 at 22:34

0

Makes sense. Corona spreads through droplets, if you aren’t coughing you aren’t throwing as many  droplets around. It’s still not harmless though and can still cause just as much damage as COVID that started with a symptomatic person if it does start to spread. We still need to keep wearing masks until we have an actual solution to treating this.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > MM54 06/08/2020 at 22:37

3

Here’s what we know for certain about COVID, after months of study by the WHO:

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 06/08/2020 at 23:57

2

I disagree.

Early 2003 had a very similar stain of virus with the outbreak in sars-cov-1 which followed a near similar timeline of spreading in China late in 2002 and ramping up towards the end of winter and spreading to other countries. It was less contagious and less deadly, but a precursor that was completely ignored once it flamed out mid June of 2003. No one gave a toss about it and we carried on our merry little ways until earlier this year. We [ the world] had the playbook on Corona virus to study more than 15 years earlier, and tossed it aside thinking we aced our game . Same with the pop up of mers-cov 2012, which once again seems to ramp up around early spring in April-May .

There’s a reason why Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea all masked up and imposed draconian virus combat measures much quicker than the rest of the world: They’ve dealt with corona virus outbreaks before , as recently as 2015 in South Korea .

Epidemiologists since the mid 90's have warned over and over that this was going to play out one day . There’s no excuse for this level of incompetence.

Nick Has an Exocet > ImmoralMinority 06/09/2020 at 02:54

1

I don’t think I trust the WHO, CDC, the states, or anyone at this point. They should all be fired. They had one job. They’d literally practiced for it. They’ve spent decades going to conferences and talking about and wasting taxpayer dollars yacking about it.

If you follow the breadcrumbs, you find that lab-modified viruses tend to lose their modifications over time. This one seems to be rapidly degrading so fast that some labs have said that they are having trouble keeping track of it. Asymptomatic cases may have very well been true before and is no longer the case.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com 06/09/2020 at 03:35

1

On the one hand, I agree with everything you’ve said. On the other hand, how’s that the WHO’s fault?

In January this year they were saying this is a  “ high severity public health emergency at the global level” and recommending that countries “ put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk.” In other words, exactly what worked for SARS and MERS, and exactly what the Asian countries that knocked covid19 back early have done. It’s not their fault most of the west either ignored them or overestimated their own capabilities in contact tracing etc.

A rguably they were l ate to the party in recommending travel shutdowns, but in their defense, if countr es had got their shit together and followed their earlier advice, travel shutdowns wouldn’t have been necessary ( and arguably wouldn’t be now , says the guy sitting in a country with closed borders because we were too slow off the mark with contact tracing and quarantine), and it’s hard for a global body to identify on a country by country basis the point where that particular boat’s been missed.

RacinBob > ImmoralMinority 06/09/2020 at 07:30

0

I pretty much concluded the same thing a while ago. Covids R is 2.4 persons spread per person infected. If asymptomatic people could be contagious, you would think it would be 10 or 20 with all the interactions people have. 

Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 06/09/2020 at 08:31

0

That was January 30th.

I know I’ll sound like the head cheeto, but were they really that stupid to believe what the Chinese were telling them when it was finally not with held and released as being a corona virus strain on Jan 12 after what happened with the sars and mers outbreaks? I will also state that China needs to accept a huge brunt of blame, with probable cover up in Dec ‘19, and for the majority of January’s poor information by releasing mere dribbles to The WHO and thus the rest of the world sealing our fate. However, I think The WHO could have read between the characters better considering they had precedent corona cases to also draw from .

Jan 14th: We have been told there may have been limited human to human transmission (later changed to no clear indication of). Jan 19th: The case count jumped from 41 to 200 and spread to different Chinese provinces as testing ramped up. Jan 21th: 291 cases. The next day on the 22nd they finally revised that human to human transmission was occurring.

Start of the last week in January they still maintained it was not a pandemic. 1st cases then started being discovered in many other countries and even then they still maintained that the cases were fringe and with isolation no spread would occur through out the countries, they also downplayed human to human transmission aspect .

They knew that they didn’t have enough corona virus research and decided to sit on their hands and watch it develop in China continuing international travel from the country through the last half of January, even into Feb? It just seems, reckless.

As we ticked to mid Feb with int flights still buzzing around the better part of the globe we became committed to a world encompassing war with covid.

Then came the whammy that was the citizen repatriation through the later half of Feb into Mar . This is where I think New York and Montreal got walloped. Due to their city density, spring break timing, laissez faire measures, and because people came back from hot spots of Europe carrying back a particularly nasty mutation. I know one person openly admitted to the news of boarding with covid symptoms while on a flight repatriating back from Spain, you can bet she wasn’t the only one . Many people also did not adhere to the 2 week self-quarantine recommendations, I know that from personal encounters.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com 06/09/2020 at 17:31

0

Re China: Yes, China were clearly being less than forthcoming in January. And the WHO knew that and were trying to do something about it and being blocked: for example in mid January China refused to let them send in their own investigative team. But they had limited options: they have zero powers of enforcement or investigation. All they could do was either publicly call them on it and hope they caved rather than stonewalling, or wheedle behind the scenes.

In the H1N1 outbreak the same thing happened and the then WHO leader publicly called China out. That time, it worked. But the WHO got punished for it for years after, both by China and by other countries who basically took the position “it’s great that you called China out, but don’t you ever get too big for your boots and do that to me!” They also got punished for “over-reacting” because after they raised the alarm, H1N1 didn’t become a large scale disaster

This time, they decided to go the wheedling route, which took longer but also worked: by mid February China were being a lot more open. Probably not fully open but who knows if that’s by design or just poor internal information - there are plenty of other countries that have a poor grasp of their own Covid situation, and people tend to forget that while China is big, it’s mostly still pretty unsophisticated. Maybe if they’d decided to be confrontational that would have worked too, but personally I wouldn’t bet on it: China are a lot more aggressive and touchy than they were a decade ago. And maybe it’s because China was a backer of Adhanom, but equally maybe it’s because he’s by nature a collaborative politician - talking people into stuff rather than bullying them into it is what he does. Which most of the time is a good thing in an organisation that, as I said, has no actual power.

Plus, regardless of that, when they popped up in late January and said “this is serious and it’s spreading, people, you need to get your act together and line up some control measures”, the fact remains that EVERYONE IGNORED THEM. If they’d popped up and said “this is serious, China is lying, and you need to get your act together and line up some control measures”, everyone would have gone “well, duh, of course China’s lying” and ignored them. It’s not like every other government in the world doesn’t already know that China understates problems: it’s a bit rich to say that this time they didn’t realise because the WHO didn’t say so openly.

Re “They knew that they didn’t have enough corona virus research and decided to sit on their hands”: on 5 February they asked member states for $675M to fund an urgent large scale 2 month coronavirus response program. They’ve been starved for money for at least a decade, as many countries cut funding levels during the GFC and never ramped back up (and see also “punished for H1N1" above) - they don’t have the cash or personnel reserves to just fire up large scale programs at will. By a month later, they’d received $1.2M. So whose fault is that?

Re pandemic: Firstly, pandemic isn’t a clearly defined word. The WHO uses a very severe definition of pandemic, because they’ve been trying for years to scare members states into putting money into pandemic preparedness by emphasising how fast and bad a global outbreak could get . By their definition, it’s basically only a pandemic once it’s across the globe in large numbers and you’ve lost all hope of controlling its spread. And through February, hope hadn’t been lost and the actual numbers in most of the world weren’t that high. It could have been controlled if the US and Europe had actually tried to do so, as witness the fact that those countries which DID take it seriously managed to control it. Calling it a pandemic in mid March was basically their way of throwing their hands up in despair and saying “we can’t stop it at this point” . And that stuff about “their definition” (a) is public information, and (b) matters - in medicine you can’t just redefine your jargon on a whim. It’s just that nobody in the media bothered to ask “OK, if you’re not calling this a pandemic, what DO you call a pandemic?” Or more accurately, that’s getting too complex for a 10 second soundbite so it never made it to prime-time: you’ll find some of the more in-depth publications explaining it if you look, but they aren’t the ones leading the news cycle.

Secondly, in terms of the way the WHO interacts with governments rather than the media, calling it a pandemic means absolutely nothing. The term that triggers all the international response protocols is Public Health Emergency of International Concern, a state which they declared on 30 January.

Re travel: In the early stages restricting travel wasn’t the right approach. Aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine was. Even now, restricting travel isn’t actually necessary if you’re doing the other stuff right: a good proportion of the countries who’ve brought it under control have done so without closed borders. You started this off by saying we hadn’t learned from SARS. Well the WHO had, and they were telling everyone to do what worked. And the Asian nations that got hit by SARS had, and they were actually DOING what worked. And guess what: it worked. Again. Just because the USA chose to ignore advice for 2 months and make zero effort to test or follow up on the people flying in, that’s not the WHO’s fault. Self quarantine didn’t work? Well it did in Korea. Because in Korea the police checked in daily on everyone self quarantining and if they weren’t complying threw them in mandatory quarantine. See any of that in the US?

Honestly, I don’t think the WHO’s response has been faultless by any description, but they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and they’re an easy scapegoat to distract people from larger failings nearer at hand. The people who’ve REALLY screwed the pooch on this one are the governments of the US, UK, and various other countries - including in the early stage my own, although at least when they finally got their act together, they got it together.