Malazan Empire: COVID-19 (aka Coronavirus, aka 2019-nCoV) - Malazan Empire

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COVID-19 (aka Coronavirus, aka 2019-nCoV)

#2981 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 10 September 2021 - 12:10 AM

'Biden Going Nuclear, Will Mandate Vaccines (or Testing) for Most Private Employees

[...] "all employers with 100 or more employees will be required to mandate COVID-19 vaccines or require testing at least once a week, and they’ll have to provide paid time off."

[...] with each violation carrying a fine of $14,000[...]

[...] Biden, moreover, plans to mandate vaccination for executive branch employees and federal contractors with no opt-out testing alternative. That rule would cover more than 4 million individuals; another mandate will extend to an estimated 17 million health care workers whose employers receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements.'


https://slate.com/ne...-employees.html

Go Biden. OTOH as has been pointed out anti-vaxxers who are unable to find a job could spiral into violence... expect an elevated risk of terrorist attacks and assassination attempts. (Nobody yelling 'Sic semper tyrannis' though I'll bet.)
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#2982 User is offline   Tsundoku 

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Posted 10 September 2021 - 10:23 PM

Why do so MANY Americans always go on about their freedoms and rights but say and do nothing about their responsibilities to the society that gives them those rights?

Because they're selfish fucking idiots.

Opinion piece:

https://www.news.com...287be16ad76ccbc

Americans slam Australia’s Covid policies as their own epidemic spirals out of control
The US is eclipsing Australia’s entire Covid death toll every day, but that hasn’t stopped some Americans from taking aim at our policies.

Sam Clench

September 11, 2021 - 7:47AM

COMMENT

The coronavirus killed 1700 Americans yesterday.

I know we’re 18 months into the pandemic, and all the statistics tend to blur together, but stop for a moment and really, seriously consider what that means.

Seventeen hundred people dead in 24 hours. That’s more victims in a single, routine day than Australia has suffered throughout the entire pandemic.

Each of them was somebody’s son or daughter; someone’s best friend; a brilliant and irreplaceable human life snuffed out years or decades too soon. Many of the dead have left behind grieving parents, spouses and young children.

History is not going to remember the horrific death toll from September 9, 2021. It won’t even register in the context of a pandemic that has killed 4.6 million people and counting, 670,000 of them in the US alone.

Here’s what history might remember: the indifference. The selfishness. The warped priorities of a nation that never treated this once-in-a-century crisis with the seriousness it demanded.

I bring up the United States’ failure, again, because in recent weeks a bunch of Americans opposed to lockdowns and other public health measures have taken it upon themselves to lecture Australia about its Covid policies.

In their view, the fact that Australians have made immense personal sacrifices to protect each other from the virus is a bad thing.

Let’s run through some examples.

“Heretofore an honourable member of the free world, Australia ‘has lurched into a bizarre and disturbing netherworld of bureaucratic oppression in the name of public health,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry, denouncing Australia’s “Covid lockdown mania”.

“Covid is a serious illness, and no country has gotten everything right. Australia has proven, though, that dispensing with key elements of advanced liberal society in the hopes of total victory over the virus is foolhardy and wrong.

“Australia isn’t going to become a dictatorship, but this period in its national life stands as a warning for how easily core freedoms can erode, in even a well-established democracy.”

“I’m not saying they should rise up against the government, but there’s some crazy s*** going on there right now,” said mega-popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

“Folks, people die from heart attacks in staggering numbers every year. You’re not making the government force people to exercise.”

Heart attacks are not infectious, but I digress.

“Normal, psychologically healthy adults see the Covid camps in Australia and think, ‘My God, that’s tyrannical madness,’” said conservative radio host Buck Sexton.

“Australia has Covid concentration camps,” said author and columnist Tim Young.

“This is about control, not health.”

Some of America’s most prominent TV hosts labelled Australia a “Covid dictatorship”.

And you might have already seen the viral meme posted by the Texas Freedom Coalition, which described Australia as “the world’s largest prison”.

“Pray for Australia. It’s almost unbelievable what is happening there,” the group said.

Let’s stipulate to the obvious, that lockdowns suck and everyone will be relieved when none of the strict measures currently in place across Australia are necessary anymore.

But spare us the overblown rhetoric. Tyrannical madness? Concentration camps? Oppression? If you want to see actual oppression, look at China, or North Korea, or the fate Afghanistan will suffer under Taliban rule.

Lowry, easily the most thoughtful among those mentioned above, accused Australia of “dispensing with key elements of advanced liberal society”. He was referring to things like freedom of movement, and he’s not without a point. Some individual rights have been temporarily curtailed to protect public health.

But there’s another key element that any functioning society requires: mutual obligation. Yes, we all have individual rights, but we also have responsibilities to one another. Every liberal democracy tries to strike a balance between those two things.

Covid is an extraordinary challenge. So many actions that are usually harmless, like large gatherings, are now dangerous. In normal times, breathing on someone might give them a whiff of your bad breath. Now it might give them a lethal disease. The calculus has changed.

So Australia has adopted a perfectly reasonable strategy, one that should be easy enough to grasp even from the other side of the Pacific: contain Covid as much as possible until enough people are vaccinated to mitigate the risk it poses.

The guiding principle here is that your desire to do whatever you want is not more important than protecting the lives of those around you. In the face of this extreme threat, your obligation to your community outweighs some of your freedoms. Most Australians seem to instinctively understand this, which is why they’ve been willing to endure lockdowns.

The alternative is to go the American route: lift the restrictions and hope for the best.

And look at the respective results. Australia’s Covid death toll is 1066. For the entire pandemic. More Americans than that died on Thursday. At the peak of its third wave earlier this year, the US was losing more than 3000 people per day.

Which of these two countries has failed? The one whose people have come together to confront the threat of Covid, making tough sacrifices, or the one which has allowed hundreds of thousands of its citizens to die needlessly in the name of freedom?

(Graphs)
Daily cases in each country. Note the current spike in Australia. You can see it if you look very closely. Picture: Our World In Data

Daily Covid deaths. Gee, I wonder which country got its strategy wrong? Picture: Our World In Data

America is a far bigger country, of course, so here is the data showing cases per million people. The difference is still stark. Picture: Our World In Data

And here we see deaths per million people. Picture: Our World In Data

The US is currently averaging 150,000 new infections every day. Its daily death toll is 1200. Hospitals across the country are swamped with unvaccinated patients and running out of ICU beds. Health workers are buckling under the strain of witnessing so much death.

Meanwhile, grown men and women are still throwing tantrums on planes because they’re being asked to put a piece of cloth on their face.

It is a slow motion trainwreck, and it has been for most of the past 18 months.

The Covid vaccines have been free and available to all adults in the US since April, yet more than a third of the country’s population remains completely unvaccinated. Australia’s vaccine rollout, which started so glacially, is now somehow on track to overtake America’s.

State leaders, Democrat and Republican, are at their wit’s end trying to convince people who think the vaccines are an affront to their personal freedom to take them. Just as they struggled to persuade their constituents to social distance and wear masks last year.

And Joe Biden’s latest attempt to increase vaccine uptake by mandating them for federal employees and hospital workers, and requiring large employers to either get their workers vaccinated or test them weekly, has been met with unhinged hostility.

Some conservative politicians are openly urging Americans to disobey the mandates and remain unvaccinated. That is to say, remain completely unprotected from the virus that could kill them.

Given the dire situation in their own country, you’d think our American friends would have a touch more humility.

How many of their countrymen have to die after ignoring public health advice, their bodies riddled with Covid and souls heavy with regret, before they get it through their heads that this is not about tyranny, or government control, or whatever the latest nonsense culture war talking point is? It’s about saving lives.

Why am I, a foreigner, angrier about 670,000 dead Americans than half of the US itself?

Maybe it’s because I can vividly recall a time when death on this sort of scale was met with horror instead of indifference.

Twenty years ago, when terrorists destroyed the twin towers, I was a middle school student in St Louis, Missouri. Obviously I was too young to understand the full ramifications of that tragedy at the time, but I do remember the convulsion of grief and disbelief that swept across the country.

Three thousand people dead in a single day. It was unthinkable. Americans were overwhelmingly united in their resolve to stop any such loss of life from happening again, which is why their government launched a global war on terror and reordered its entire national security apparatus.

It was all done in the name of protecting Americans’ lives.

Where is that resolve now? Where has it been throughout this pandemic? Here we are two decades later, suffering the 9/11 death toll multiple times per week, and millions of Americans still think public health restrictions – not the virus – are the true enemy.

Australia did exactly what a mature, serious country should do in this situation, confronting the pandemic directly and minimising loss of life. Pragmatism won out over ideology.

Unlike some countries, we got our priorities right.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 10 September 2021 - 10:23 PM

"Fortune favors the bold, though statistics favor the cautious." - Indomitable Courteous (Icy) Fist, The Palace Job - Patrick Weekes

"Well well well ... if it ain't The Invisible C**t." - Billy Butcher, The Boys

"I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it." - Colonel Orhan, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - KJ Parker
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#2983 User is offline   Tiste Simeon 

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Posted 11 September 2021 - 08:14 AM

I saw someone say something to the tune of "apparently asking Americans to consider someone else was a step too far."

It's heartbreaking.

Disclaimer: obviously, not all Americans, obviously all countries have their horrible selfish people but man, America likes to play it bigger as per usual.
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#2984 User is offline   QuickTidal 

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Posted 13 September 2021 - 12:41 PM

Some group of dumbass U.S. anti-science nurses intermingled with our PPC/Alt-Right/Anti-vaxx/Anti-lockdown groups have organized a load of protests outside HOSPITALS across Canada, and in some cases they are threatening to bring guns (this is not normal for Canada obviously) and STORM into the hospitals to "prove COVID is fake".

Hospital Row in Toronto is around the corner from my home, so this hits WAY too close.

But yeah, wanna protest the rules and regulations? Go to Queen's Park, stay the fuck away from hospitals. Holy shit this timeline sucks.

The police better arrest these MFers. If they can kick out a homeless tent encampment with such prejudice, surely they can arrest mentally unstable fuckwits trying to storm a hospital.

EDIT: I walk home from the transit after work through this area too....so hopefully I can manage to avoid them.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 13 September 2021 - 12:42 PM

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#2985 User is offline   Malankazooie 

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Posted 13 September 2021 - 07:52 PM

That's how you own the libs.

COVID Patient at Center of Ivermectin Debate at Chicago-Area Hospital Dies

* link is to www.nbcchicago.com

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#2986 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 13 September 2021 - 09:41 PM

'"Vaccine Changes Your RNA": [Florida Governor] DeSantis Stands by as City Employee Spouts COVID Misinformation

[...] DeSantis looked down briefly, but did not correct Friend at the time or afterward. [...] the governor's office issued a response to the clip, saying, "The governor has never said the vaccine changes your RNA. This is not the governor's opinion." [Ugh. Treating that as a matter of "opinion" is vile. Also has no "opinion" about whether it contains the microchip mark of the Beast that will sell your soul to the child-eating lizard demon Joe Biden?]

Other men and women stood up at the conference to express skepticism about the vaccine, which has been mandated for city employees in Gainesville, along with other Florida districts like Orange County and Leon County. [...] DeSantis [...] announced that Florida will fine local governments $5,000 for each employee who is required to be vaccinated. "That's millions and millions of dollars potentially in fines," DeSantis noted. [gloated]'

https://www.thedaily...mation?ref=home

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 13 September 2021 - 09:42 PM

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#2987 User is offline   Gwynn ap Nudd 

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Posted 17 September 2021 - 12:06 AM

The vaccine passport is now in effect here. Hopefully not being able to eat at restaurants, go to the club, a show or the gym will convince more people to get vaccinated. Looks like we had a small spike in doses administered around the day it started. Need to see that continue to rise.
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#2988 User is offline   Malankazooie 

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Posted 17 September 2021 - 02:34 AM

I need someone to give me a short synopsis on the Nicki Minaj thing. I don't follow pop news or entertainment news or the 24/7 distraction machine, but this topic has been destroying my news headline scroll. What's up with it? More importantly, will it go away soon, or is it going to stay around awhile?
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#2989 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 17 September 2021 - 07:32 AM

Quick google says she's spouting about the covid vaccine causing impotence.

Somehow I'm not surprised to see someone who produces that quality of music coming out with that quality of conspiracy theory but there we go.



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#2990 User is offline   Malankazooie 

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Posted 17 September 2021 - 06:17 PM

I gotta say, what little I have followed of it, it has been a joy to hear serious discussion and statements made in very distinct Caribbean island accents. From now on I'm going to imagine Dr. Fauci talking in that accent when he makes his next covid media tour of major news outlets.
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#2991 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 20 September 2021 - 07:41 AM

View PostMalankazooie, on 17 September 2021 - 06:17 PM, said:

I gotta say, what little I have followed of it, it has been a joy to hear serious discussion and statements made in very distinct Caribbean island accents. From now on I'm going to imagine Dr. Fauci talking in that accent when he makes his next covid media tour of major news outlets.


Nep Furrow for next US Press Secretary please?
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#2992 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 21 September 2021 - 10:22 PM

'A second shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been found to provide 94 percent protection against the virus, providing much more immunity than a single shot alone, the company announced [...] Citing data from its Phase 3 trial, the company said a booster shot administered six months after the first one provides a 12-fold increase in antibodies. "Our single-shot vaccine generates strong immune responses and long-lasting immune memory. And, when a booster of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is given, the strength of protection against COVID-19 further increases,"'

https://www.thedaily...nst-coronavirus

So if this is right the difference in efficacy apparently had nothing to do with mRNA vs traditional... similarly it's been speculated that the greater efficacy of Moderna could be from higher dosage amount or more time between shots....

MOAR!

Though my imaginary quest to 'collect them all' for maximal hybrid vigor might demonstrate there's a point at which MOAR no longer = better (but definitely bettor...).

'DeSantis Taps Anti-Mask Vax Skeptic to Be Florida's Next Surgeon General

[...] an anti-mask, vaccine-skeptical, Harvard-trained researcher[...]

[...] he called it "senseless" to prioritize vaccinations over everything else, adding that he prefers "personal choice" over mask or vaccine mandates and is proposing a vague strategy that will "reject fear as a way of making policies." He said "losing weight, exercising more [and] eating more fruits and vegetables" were just as important as vaccines in fighting COVID—another totally baseless claim.'

https://www.thedaily...eneral?ref=home

God damn I wish DeSantis were actually dumb / willfully ignorant enough to not have gotten himself vaccinated. O Skynet, where art thou?
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#2993 User is offline   QuickTidal 

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Posted 22 September 2021 - 12:51 PM

Canadians in Ontario.

Vaccine Passports go into effect today.

Just a heads up until we get our app-based QR codes in October, go to the Provincial portal where you made your vaccine appt. and it will let you download both receipts.

For ease of use, export out of the browser as a PDF, email it to your phone, save it as an image and heart it as a favourite....now it's super easy accessible and you needn't carry round two sheets of paper with you for a month.
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#2994 User is offline   Malankazooie 

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Posted 24 September 2021 - 06:50 AM

Saw a segment on the Daily Show where parents are protesting at a school board meeting about masks. I guess the new rage in anti-vax swag and fashion are the "I don't co-parent with the government" t-shirts because everyone was wearing one.
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#2995 User is offline   Malankazooie 

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Posted 25 September 2021 - 01:00 AM

Good crimony, boosters dominating this topic so much now. Maybe get everyone vaccinated first? But I think I heard a governor say we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. You sure about that gov?
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#2996 User is offline   James Hutton 

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Posted 25 September 2021 - 07:06 AM

View PostMalankazooie, on 25 September 2021 - 01:00 AM, said:

Maybe get everyone vaccinated first?


This. The whole world, please and thank you.
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#2997 User is offline   Tsundoku 

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Posted 25 September 2021 - 08:40 PM

Ummmm Norway, are you sure about this? I know Denmark did it first buuuuuuuuuut ...:unsure:

https://www.news.com...2049ce938596b39

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 25 September 2021 - 08:44 PM

"Fortune favors the bold, though statistics favor the cautious." - Indomitable Courteous (Icy) Fist, The Palace Job - Patrick Weekes

"Well well well ... if it ain't The Invisible C**t." - Billy Butcher, The Boys

"I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it." - Colonel Orhan, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - KJ Parker
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#2998 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 26 September 2021 - 04:28 AM

View PostMalankazooie, on 25 September 2021 - 01:00 AM, said:

Good crimony, boosters dominating this topic so much now. Maybe get everyone vaccinated first? But I think I heard a governor say we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. You sure about that gov?


'The U.S. is discarding millions of Covid vaccines
Sept. 23, 2021


[...] clinics forced to discard open vials because they couldn't find enough people who wanted to get vaccinated[...]


[...] wasting at least 15.1 million vaccine doses from March through August — and has raised questions about the decision to continue distributing Covid vaccines in multi-dose vials, which offer less flexibility to providers as they focus on getting shots to the people who are hardest to reach.'


https://www.nbcnews....i-dose-n1279901

I'll probably get a booster soon. Still haven't decided what name to make up....

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 26 September 2021 - 04:29 AM

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#2999 User is offline   Macros 

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Posted 26 September 2021 - 09:45 AM

View PostTsundoku, on 25 September 2021 - 08:40 PM, said:

Ummmm Norway, are you sure about this? I know Denmark did it first buuuuuuuuuut ...:unsure:

https://www.news.com...2049ce938596b39


You seen the premier League games this season? UK has been full stadiuming for a month
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#3000 User is offline   Tsundoku 

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Posted 26 September 2021 - 10:04 AM

View PostMacros, on 26 September 2021 - 09:45 AM, said:

View PostTsundoku, on 25 September 2021 - 08:40 PM, said:

Ummmm Norway, are you sure about this? I know Denmark did it first buuuuuuuuuut ...:unsure:

https://www.news.com...2049ce938596b39


You seen the premier League games this season? UK has been full stadiuming for a month


Yes, and the infection rates are still high from what I understand. I think the hospitalisation rate fell but ah well.
It wasn't about that but getting the economy going again ie keeping rich people rich because it's only the proles, minorities and the old who are dying and that suits the Tories.
"Fortune favors the bold, though statistics favor the cautious." - Indomitable Courteous (Icy) Fist, The Palace Job - Patrick Weekes

"Well well well ... if it ain't The Invisible C**t." - Billy Butcher, The Boys

"I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it." - Colonel Orhan, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - KJ Parker
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