COVID-19 / Coronavirus Pandemic

[TeDaDeS]

The original, or the 2016 one?

2016 is the reboot, the original is 1993.

Also I read somewhere that North-Korea had their first covid case and instituted a country wide lock-down to stop the spread.
I might have misunderstood the situation, but that sounded like a pretty strict lock-down for a few cases.

 

[netcat]

Lockdowns disgust me. We have proven they don't work because covid rebounds. I can't help but think that the regimes that still prescribe them want to decimate small businesses, the working class and young people with livelihoods. Yep. Makes sense to me.

 

[levi]

Lockdowns at least delay a severe outbreak, giving the health system time to gear up and get prepared. But for this to be North Korea's first outbreak of Covid given it's got a largely undefended northern border to china where this virus originated seems extremely lucky. I suspect they've had more outbreaks but perhaps limited to northern villages where they're almost certainly less tracking and almost no sequencing, and given the population is generally younger than more developed countries (because you die early), and maybe some people able to get to china were able to get vaccinated there if they have walk in centres.

 

[Askarus]

Lockdowns at least delay a severe outbreak, giving the health system time to gear up and get prepared

If the healh system was prepared properly during the last 3 years, we would not need any lockdown or mask mandates or whatever.

Government rather wastes billions of € here financing those lockdowns and whatever.
Instead we could have taken the money and time we invested into measurements which hurt people and the economy and reformed the health system and build more hospitals.

Make it so people working at hospitals have better working conditions and build more hospitals (so many closed because of a flawed health reform years ago).

Government and pro-lockdown people always say we must do a lockdown, else the health system would crash.
Why not strengthen the health system instead of weakening everything else.
It's 3 almost years now since COVID-19 outbreak.
Plenty of time to train more nurses and get more equipment.

 

[netcat]

One theme these days that's quite prevalent to me is presidents posturing. Trying to be big men mainly but also avoid criticism. Do N. Koreans even know about covid? One thing they do know is Kim is supreme. He obviously doesn't give a f about his economy.

In the news last night they spoke of British Nation Health Service (NHS) ambulances taking 4 hours to arrive. Presumably this was not previously the case. What has changed? Sure it's related to lack of funds. I would guess spiralling IT costs, basically the NHS being taken for a ride by everyone from microsoft to pfizer as well all those IT consultants. NHS funding is at an all time high.

 

[levi]

@Askarus Yes, with hindsight it would make a lot of sense to not let the health service get into such a mess, but in times not of crises, it;s hard to know how much money the health service actually needs because at a certain level it's a bit of a bureaucracy and will buy as many MRI machines as you pay for before fixing any more fundamental issues,

In the news last night they spoke of British Nation Health Service (NHS) ambulances taking 4 hours to arrive. Presumably this was not previously the case. What has changed? Sure it's related to lack of funds. I would guess spiralling IT costs, basically the NHS being taken for a ride by everyone from microsoft to pfizer as well all those IT consultants. NHS funding is at an all time high.

I think it's more likely due to the train of ambulances waiting to offload their patients to hospital we also saw.on the news. Exactly what's causing that though I can't exactly say.

 

[Askarus]

@Askarus Yes, with hindsight it would make a lot of sense to not let the health service get into such a mess, but in times not of crises, it;s hard to know how much money the health service actually needs because at a certain level it's a bit of a bureaucracy and will buy as many MRI machines as you pay for before fixing any more fundamental issues,

We're 3 years in that crisis now.
I'm talking about improving the health system for the last 3 years.
Not much was done in that regard.

I mean we have a national army serving no other purpose other than to defend the country in case there is an enemy invasion.
If we had a health army with only 10% the size and budget of the German army on standby that whole crisis would not have had such a huge impact.

Why do we spend billions in weapons each year, but don't have a strong health army.

I'm not against military forces and weapons. They are important for the country. I'm just wondering why we don't spend 10% of the budget in a health force driven by the Government which does not need to make profit and is professionally trained like soldiers to help in emergency situations.

 

[netcat]

@Askarus Yes, with hindsight it would make a lot of sense to not let the health service get into such a mess, but in times not of crises, it;s hard to know how much money the health service actually needs because at a certain level it's a bit of a bureaucracy and will buy as many MRI machines as you pay for before fixing any more fundamental issues,


I think it's more likely due to the train of ambulances waiting to offload their patients to hospital we also saw.on the news. Exactly what's causing that though I can't exactly say.

Ok that would explain it. Another theme i detect quite often these days regression. Things we were better at before but somehow lost the plot.

 

[TeDaDeS]

Looks like omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 are reinfecting people that have had vaccination and/or omicron BA.1, the symptoms do appear to be progressively milder though.

 

[Confuzzled]

@Askarus Yes, with hindsight it would make a lot of sense to not let the health service get into such a mess, but in times not of crises, it;s hard to know how much money the health service actually needs because at a certain level it's a bit of a bureaucracy and will buy as many MRI machines as you pay for before fixing any more fundamental issues,


I think it's more likely due to the train of ambulances waiting to offload their patients to hospital we also saw.on the news. Exactly what's causing that though I can't exactly say.

According to a segment of BBC Radio 4 (Could have been 'Today', or 'PM', or an NHS manager on ?call You and Yours) , it is partly due to lack f adequate nursing/care-home provision. If there are no care home places, the NHS can't discharge elderly people, who take up (expensive) hospital beds. This has knock-on effects, such as A&E being unable to transfer patients to wards, so ambulances wait outside A&E. It's obviously a little more complicated than that, but that is a partial answer. In addition, Covid-19 had the effect of many people postponing treatment, either voluntarily, or out of necessity, and now the backlog needs to be dealt with. Pre Covid-19, the bed occupancy rates in general were very high (I think aiming at 95%, Nuffield Trust: Hospital Bed Occupancy; maze of statistics here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/bed-availability-and-occupancy/), which meant there was little slack in the system to accommodate excess demand. So a small rise in demand causes very long queues.

You need slack to accommodate unpredicatable variations in demand. Insufficient slack means demand can exceed resources available to service demand, which means either demand goes unfulfilled, or you get queueing. The worse the overshoot in demand, the longer the queue, leading to waits of hours for ambulances.

 

[levi]

According to a segment of BBC Radio 4 (Could have been 'Today', or 'PM', or an NHS manager on ?call You and Yours) , it is partly due to lack f adequate nursing/care-home provision. If there are no care home places, the NHS can't discharge elderly people, who take up (expensive) hospital beds. This has knock-on effects, such as A&E being unable to transfer patients to wards, so ambulances wait outside A&E. It's obviously a little more complicated than that, but that is a partial answer. In addition, Covid-19 had the effect of many people postponing treatment, either voluntarily, or out of necessity, and now the backlog needs to be dealt with. Pre Covid-19, the bed occupancy rates in general were very high (I think aiming at 95%, Nuffield Trust: Hospital Bed Occupancy; maze of statistics here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/bed-availability-and-occupancy/), which meant there was little slack in the system to accommodate excess demand. So a small rise in demand causes very long queues.

Elderly people blocking beds has been a feature of our hospitals for over 20 years now. If that's the issue, why is it biting now? As for your argument about people booking overdue operations and tests, those people don't go into A&E, they have specific departments those go to. Perhaps they can't get out of A&E if they need to be kept in, though, and perhaps those people on trolleys are fowling up A&E, but I'd be very surprised if that was going on and A&E managers weren't already raising a hullabaloo about it before we saw stacked up ambulances.

To be fair there was a little bit of ambulance stacking during the first wave of covid, according to the TV programme called Ambulance. But it seems to be worse now, and I've still not heard a good explanation of what's changed.

 

[netcat]

They have a snazzy new rapid booking system for all new patients that isn't malfunctioning it just isn't setup quite right. Something like that.

 

[TeDaDeS]

Looks like there might be a conflict of interest as Anthony Fauci appears to have received 23 'royalty payments' from pharmaceutical companies:

Quote: "We found agency leadership and top scientists at NIH receiving royalty payments. Well-known scientists receiving payments during the period included:

• Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the highest-paid federal bureaucrat, received 23 royalty payments. (Fauci’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $456,028).
  
• Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009-2021, received 14 payments. (Collins’ 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $203,500)
  
• Clifford Lane, Fauci’s deputy at NIAID, received 8 payments. (Lane’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $325,287)

In the above examples, although we know the number of payments to each scientist, we still don’t know how much money was paid – because the dollar figure was deleted (redacted) from the disclosures.
It’s been a struggle to get any useful information out of the agency on its royalty payments. NIH is acting like royalty payments are a state secret. (They’re not, or shouldn’t be!)"
Source: https://www.openthebooks.com/substa...million-royalty-payment-stream-hidden-by-nih/

 

[Linux-SWAT]

I'm not surprised at all. It's the same in France.

 

[levi]

What is a royalty payment? Is it to do with licensing patents?

Wikipedia has an extensive article on the practice, and suggest it could result from the licensing of land for mining interests, patent rights, or the licensing of copyrighted material. I'd imaging Fauci had written some books, and the payment to the author is termed a royalty payment when the publisher pays the author based on the number and value of sales. I don't think he'd written any music, though it wouldn't surprise me if his words had been put to music by someone like cassetteboy, and that might give him partial copyright, and may result in youtube paying him every time that track is played.

 

[TeDaDeS]

What is a royalty payment? Is it to do with licensing patents?

Wikipedia has an extensive article on the practice, and suggest it could result from the licensing of land for mining interests, patent rights, or the licensing of copyrighted material. I'd imaging Fauci had written some books, and the payment to the author is termed a royalty payment when the publisher pays the author based on the number and value of sales. I don't think he'd written any music, though it wouldn't surprise me if his words had been put to music by someone like cassetteboy, and that might give him partial copyright, and may result in youtube paying him every time that track is played.

I haven't done any research so I can be wrong, but how I read it the situation was like this: NIH funds the research into medication. The people funding are thus involved in the research and are labeled as co-developers of the medication. Hence they receive royalty payments when the medication is sold. And even if Fauci would actually be doing the research 100% by himself, it would be a conflict of interest to then also decide it can be released and mandated. As there will always be the question if you made the choice based on actual evidence or with the idea of making some money.

 

[levi]

Has any medicine actually ever been mandated? Some medicines you need to live if you've got cancer or something like that, but as far as I know you could always refuse treatment. In terms of vaccines, I've always had to phone up my doctors to get my doses, because it seemed like a good idea for my health to get it. The idea of vaccine certificates does approach the idea of mandating vaccination, but myself since getting my vaccine certificate sent to me, I've never even taken it out of the house to use it. I think in this country at least, it was never used.

 

[netcat]

In England if you weren't vaccinated you were blamed for the deaths iirc.

 

[TeDaDeS]

As it's unclear if royalty payments are done regarding the covid vaccines it could be not related to mandated treatments.

If it would be the case that after Fauci advised vaccination mandates he received royalty payments for those vaccines, I would assume people could think he might have done so to get those royalties.
This might not be the case though, but having the appearance of a conflict of interest is already something you don't want to happen.

Has any medicine actually ever been mandated? Some medicines you need to live if you've got cancer or something like that, but as far as I know you could always refuse treatment. In terms of vaccines, I've always had to phone up my doctors to get my doses, because it seemed like a good idea for my health to get it. The idea of vaccine certificates does approach the idea of mandating vaccination, but myself since getting my vaccine certificate sent to me, I've never even taken it out of the house to use it. I think in this country at least, it was never used.

Some examples I found:
All NIH staff required covid-19 vaccination: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2021/10/29/covid-19-vaccination-mandate-applies-all-nih-staff
The US government employees had mandated vaccination: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us...al-employee-covid-vaccine-mandate-2022-04-07/
People traveling to the US via airplane required vaccination: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/proof-of-vaccination.html

 

[JDTAY]

Move over, COVID. The next big thing is here.

Monkeypox case confirmed in Massachusetts