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The Novel Novel [Coronavirus] Discussion Thread
Shivahn
Unaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderator mod
Unaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderator mod
The old thread was too long, so here is a novel thread for discussing the novel coronavirus.
Just going to plagiarize ceres write an amazing and definitely novel OP entirely by myself:
Tl;dr: Be kind, be truthful and cite things, and if you're going to post in the updates thread with something that is not an update, post it here instead.
Just going to plagiarize ceres write an amazing and definitely novel OP entirely by myself:
As the title states, this thread is for discussion surrounding covid and how it has affected us, our communities, others, and the world, while the updates thread is for information/updates about the virus itself.
Cite your sources and don't post bad or wrong or dishonestly-framed information; mod patience for this kind of thing is especially thin right now.
We've all had a terrible time of the past year, so try not to be jerks to each other.
Tl;dr: Be kind, be truthful and cite things, and if you're going to post in the updates thread with something that is not an update, post it here instead.
+6
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
I also learned mandatory inoculations for military have existed since the founding of the country when George Washington was stabbing small pox survivors then stabbing healthy people. At least that's how I like to imagine it.
Shame them. SHAME THEM!!
The prevailing narrative this week has been every single place I've visited this week has a hiring sign up, with pay rising from 8-9 dollars an hour to 11-12 dollars an hour, to coax all the people on $300 dollar unemployment to come back to work.
We were turned away from a restaurant for lack of staff.
It's a poor area, so $300 is probably more a week than people were making working 40 hours a week being yelled at by an unreasonable boss.
Everyone wanted to hug.............well everyone but me
So that’s how it’s gonna be huh
I'm not sure what work will ultimately be like. Our office is low key encouraging people to do work from home permanently, and mine is a job that absolutely can be done remotely, so unless my manager is stupid about it, I should get to keep doing it. I think she'll be reasonable, but she's the number two in the organization, so if she decides to be difficult about it, there's really nowhere to complain. And she did have occasional bouts of stubborn irrationality.
Fingers crossed. I've grown quite fond of not having to deal with other humans.
Though I guess over here there's also more focus on the news from India to add to the impact, but still - it's enough that the UK is considering slowing down relaxing of the later stages of lockdown rules and I thought we had similar vaccination rates to the States (and perhaps more focused on preventing hospitalisations). They're starting to vaccinate teenagers in the areas where the new variant has arrived, ahead of schedule.
According to the GISAID variant tracker, variant B.1.617 (first observed in India) has been in the US since February, and to date there have been a total of 1,011 confirmed cases of this variant.
Note that apparently the existing vaccines do have some measure of protection against B.1.617. Combined with the fact that the US is absolute shit at sequencing, even now, and that means that there probably are more cases that are undetected. Testing AND sequencing are on the decline in the States overall.
The vaccines are likely stomping down the B.1.617 variant in the states, though. That variant was just starting to do the rounds just as vaccines started to surge.
are they vaccinated?
probably nooooot!
The main thing is that it's still Emergency Use Authorization rather than standard approved vaccination. And, honestly, even though it is terrible right now I'm pretty happy that we have labor protections that don't allow your boss to demand you get pumped full of experimental drugs to work someplace.
It'll get normal approval in due course and then become a requirement for everything, just like measles or the pox. It'd just be nice if 'not killing other people and dying a painful death' was sufficient motivation for people.
Oh yeah, I wouldn't want it mandatory yet. It just came up in the chief FB group with the regular idiots saying the military shouldn't force personnel to get vaccines.
Which
lol
But I figured I'd go look up when vaccinations were mandatory expecting maybe WWI and learned inoculations in general the military's existence. Just with knives and other people's blood and scarification.
Going to be interesting in a week or two to see if people actually stayed local or not this weekend. If not, we may see spikes in regional covid numbers, or maybe the rising tide of vaccinations will mitigate it. We've opened it to kids down to 12 now, so I'm super happy my brother's kids are all eligible now.
Who knows!
We're eligible in July.
but I did just get my flu vax last night, so I've gotten at least one stab wound!
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
All six non-voting members, every single Democrat, and less than half of the Republicans. Listed by name too if you want to see if your local idiot is slightly less stupid than some others. Granted, some of the Republicans may have been vaccinated secretly and are keeping it quiet just like their lord and god Trump, but you know what it shows.
As a reminder, a house republican died of COVID in February...
But to the GOP, "It was God's Will anyway! So it's all Good."
My idiot Trumper Rep is vaccinated. Honestly, I am disappointed
that's also a good point.
Pretty wild honestly.
(I know this would accomplish nothing, but it would make me feel better.)
I am really hoping we have more and more states try weird stuff like this. Humans seem weirdly averse to vaccinations for reasons I just can't understand. Smallpox vaccination often happened at gun point which tells the whole story of what to expect in terms of mass vaccine acceptance I feel. It is hard to even imagine a disease that could prove more devastating to humans, and still people fucked around with it. Scare tactics won't work so let's try to get creative.
52% of the total population now got their first dose.
In fairness, there was a very thin line, with those first vaccinations, separating it from just straight up giving you smallpox.
That'd just start a fight about having to register said guns and why are minorities allowed to have them too
In fairness, "We're going to give you a potentially deadly virus* on purpose so you don't get sick later" isn't exactly intuitive :razz:
*yes I know that's not actually how most vaccines work
Weirdly, considering I live in a town with lots of old people, my closest vaccination centre is Leeds United football stadium
Still, the first time I've looked forward to going to a football ground
We've had very few people come into the library without masks. The only one I saw yesterday was a lady who we had issues with in the last few months with wearing a mask; when she was told masks were required, she went ballistic with "HAVEN'T YOU READ THE GOVERNOR'S ORDERS? IT'S NOT REQUIRED IF YOU HAVE A HEALTH CONDITION THAT PREVENTS YOU FROM WEARING ONE!" Anyway, now none of us have to deal with mask enforcement, which I guess makes the job less stressful? Most of the staff are vaccinated, although I am pretty sure one staff member is refusing the vaccine and she's someone who last year asked during a Zoom staff meeting "Are you aware that they're building a 5G tower near the library? What is being done to protect staff?"
Anyway, my library system is removing the 30-minute daily limit in two weeks and we're fully reopening to the public. It's going to be weird.
My Backloggery
Yeah my county is hovering around 60 cases a day. We've got an Air Force Base here though so I wonder if that's related. Lots of people going in and out.
In Oregon, mask enforcement is theoretically being replaced by vax status verification. Im sure that's less awkward!
See, I would be fired from that job because my instinctual and immediate response would be “complementary tinfoil hats will be provided to all staffers who request one” and I frankly doubt my brain would react quick enough to intercede and interrupt my mouth.
Every store I've been to in the Eugene/Springfield area has said fuck that and kept the mask mandates up. Its mostly working. Costco surprisingly was the worst one with folks walking around unmasked. They certainly weren't checking status. That or people just took their masks off as soon as they got inside.
Places like Fred Meyers and stuff like 95% of folks were still masked.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
There are also a lot of other random variants that have similar mutations. The Indian B.1.617 variant isn't particularly special compared to e.g. the Brazilian P.1 variant (they, in fact, share an escape mutation at the same point, though the mutation isn't the same), and according to the GISAID tracker, B.1.617 is present in the US at a sixth the rate P.1 is.
So the US is B.1.617: 1.5% of cases
The UK is B.1.617: 23.8% of cases
That might be why you don't hear much about it :P