Coronavirus
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Looks as if the government in England gave in too readily to the business lobby and have now been forced to row back in a bid to avoid a second wave.
Just when you thought things across the pond couldn’t get any wackier…..
Trump is pushing the coronavirus theories of a Houston doctor who says sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns.
Those are Quacks Doctors supported by Doctor Donald Trump who knows shit about Medicine and Medical Microbiology. The problem is that many religious fanatics are going to follow them, religion has always played a very important part in the USA political system, still, there are a lot of Torquemada
Governments round the world have been following the dictates of profit and opening up too soon. And they know full well that only some people are going to obey the rules. And who can blame them? Messages about the spread of the virus have been mixed to say the least. We do know that now cases are on a gradual rise but I suspect it’s nothing like we might see in winter.
On Saturday night four of us went to a pub for a meal. This was my first time at an eatery since the pandemic started. They were observing the rules in that you had to sanitise your hands, sign in and sit outside because there wasn’t enough room for social distancing inside. But there the precautions ended – the pub’s garden area was pretty crowded and nobody was really keeping any distance, which would have been nigh on impossible. Actually I was pretty scared and my first instinct was to run – especially living as I do in Northampton, which is on the list of potential hotspots.
But how much danger was I really in? Frankly I have no idea. All I keep thinking back to is that a socialist society would in all probability never let a virus get to these proportions, it would be nipped in the bud at source.
“All I keep thinking back to is that a socialist society would in all probability never let a virus get to these proportions, it would be nipped in the bud at source.”
What specific measures might be taken do you think?
There is a new bill in the US Senate submitted by Bernie Sanders to impose a 60% taxation on the richest peoples in the USA to cover for the medical cost of the Coronavirus pandemic. Probably, this bill will not go through because the US Congress is a club of rich peoples
I think in a socialist society we are going to have world diseases and probably pandemic, but they are going to be treated in a different way, and they are going to be treated rapidly because most human and technology and medical resources are going to be used to fill the needs of the human beings instead of being used to produce profits.
“What specific measures might be taken do you think?”
It could be argued that the conditions for the spread of a virus like Covid, at least to fatal pandemic proportions, wouldn’t be there in the first place – no overcrowding, general bad health etc. And no encroachment of humans on animal “territory”.
I’m sure there would be an efficient testing and tracing system in place right from the word go, and there would be no trade-off between health considerations and the need to keep business moving. So all that might be needed would be a handful of very localised “lockdowns”.
Any lockdown recommendations would obviously need the agreement of the local population affected but why wouldn’t they?
Hospitals would be much more able to cope right from the start – no shortages of space or PPE etc. At least I would hope so. I would envisage every local community having its own supply of PPE on a pretty much permanent basis.
And then of course there would be no cover-ups as nobody would be trying to cover their backs or have anything to gain from hiding information. Not to mention the lack of competition for who could produce a vacccine that was profitable.
There has been a constant argument that intensive industrialised factory farming of livestock has been identified as high risk for zoonoses diseases
There has been ample early warning.
Rather than following the current model of food production, a socialist society would be a more diversified approach. lessening the chances of pathogens jumping species.
Donald Trump wanted the USA to be number one and be great again, well, it is the number one in COVID 19, with more than 5 million infections and 163 thousand death, and more than 100 thousand children are also infected. Some hospitals do not have any medical supplies and medical equipment. New Zealand has 19 cases and Vietnam has 847 cases. Personally, I think that the statistic of the USA infections are false, I think they are double or triple
There seems to be manipulation of figures in NY.
https://apnews.com/212ccd87924b6906053703a00514647f
New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes could actually be a significant undercount as New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.
The governor of NY Andrew Cuomo was interviewed numerous times on CNN by his own brother Chris Cuomo where he faced as you can expect friendly soft questioning even when it was apparent that the care-home toll was extraordinary high. He was never challenged on anything, his claims taken at face-value until CNN’s Jake Tapper did a piece and instead of answering him directly Andrew Cuomo went on another program to refute the charges. CNN is clearly to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to Trump. (MSNBC are also uncritical of the Democratic Party and was a news outlet that targeted Sanders)
Globally the elderly in care-homes were initially sacrificed as low-priority but the policy was the continuation of a trend that began with the privatisation of caring for the old and it became a for-profit industry. A demographic who are disposable and are discarded.
I don’t really understand some of the UK figures. “The science” is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand for several weeks the graphs have been showing a slight daily increase in new cases, back to around 1,000 now (and the actual number of new cases will be significantly higher, though this isn’t being concealed), but if so how can the magical R number as low as 0.8 to 1?
Who the hell can follow the statistics…they are contradictory & probably deliberately so….a version of divide and rule?
James
I don’t claim to be au fait with all of the stats, but as I understand the R number, it is effectively the reproductive rate i.e. the general rate at which 1 individual infects more individuals. Therefore less than one, the number of cases is decreasing, more than one, the number of cases is increasing.
However it appears with this virus, as there are a great number of asymptomatic cases, this rate can be quite tricky to judge. (it’s a bit like trying to say how many invisible men are in the room, you don’t know because they’re invisible).
The R rate is an estimate of the rise in the population who have Covid 19. The number of positive tests is likely to be impacted by the number of tests (if you test a random sample of the population you are likely to get more positive tests, than if you test just those who are symptomatic), but that rate will not only go up the more you test, it will also go up by a much higher rate when you are tracking and testing (you have gone from testing symptomatic people, to then testing randomly, to then testing to a bigger cohort of people who have been in direct contact with people who have the virus). This all means that the people being tested have a higher probablility of being positive. The mathematical difficulty is working out how this compares to a previous cohort, who were not tested using the same parameters.
There are other problems with the R rate (although it does appears to be important). The daily rate of infections does not relect the general rate of infection, as it appears that people can be infectious for up to 14 days. So if for instance I was one person who had Covid 19, I might infect one person every 4 days or I might infect 4 people and then self isolate. Other people in the cohort who got the infection on the same day as me might infect people in a different pattern. Which is why it is important to look at the general pattern of infection and why it is looked at in greater retrospect than just what happened on one particular day.
The R rate also becomes less relevant when you get to very low numbers. The 7 day R rate in New Zealand at the moment is, I believe, an astonishing 29. This sounds horrendous, but because they had no cases and now through extensive track and trace, they have managed to identify lots of close contacts to the particular family that had the virus, the number of postive tests is proportionally very high, however, they still only have 29 identified case in the last five days. It’s a bit like when employers say “well we gave you a 15% rise last year” 15%of bollocks all, is less than bollocks all, although the lead figure, 15% sounds very impressive.
The government’s campaign, just launched, to persuade office workers to stop working at home and go back to working in their offices exposes the hypocrisy of its previous talk of it being a ‘moral duty’, a ‘moral imperative’, etc for schoolkids to go back to school.
It’s nothing to do with the supposed risks to their health if they don’t go back to school but to make it easier for office workers to go back to working in their offices so that city centre businesses don’t lose more profits.
In any event the evidence that not going to school is bad for your health is pretty dubious. What are they missing out on other than being trained to be various grades of wage slaves?
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