Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Crikey - can you imagine the golfists seeing people tramping all over their carefully manicured greensward in non-regulation footwear.

Neigh

You can give them oxygen earlier, rather than wait until they are already struggling to breathe

Send people in earlier so they wont be as ill? WTAF.

First part of https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.html

They call them corona taxis: Medics outfitted in protective gear,
driving around the empty streets of Heidelberg to check on patients
who are at home, five or six days into being sick with the
coronavirus.

They take a blood test, looking for signs that a patient is about to
go into a steep decline. They might suggest hospitalization, even to a
patient who has only mild symptoms; the chances of surviving that
decline are vastly improved by being in a hospital when it begins.

Also covers the discssuon above on number of people tested..

Another explanation for the low fatality rate is that Germany has been
testing far more people than most nations. That means it catches more
people with few or no symptoms, increasing the number of known cases,
but not the number of fatalities.

What’s the deal with golf courses then? Are they rewilding themselves or have they found some bullshit excuse for their armies of manicurists to keep working?

This tweet showing global flights is illuminating:
https://twitter.com/Lexialex/status/1246990432501772288

Is interesting that Japan is starting to spike now the Olympics have been postponed.

#JustSayin

You're not the only one to have that suspicion, however: the Olympics were postponed to 2021 on March 24th. That's 2 weeks ago, ages in Corona time.

Send people in earlier so they wont be as ill? WTAF.

First part of https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world­/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.h­tml

Speaking from personal experience, which of course is just anecdote I know, is that in Germany healthcare workers are forever trying to persuade people to check in to a hospital while in many other countries staff are trying to think of any excuse to keep people out.

I am on Germany tho!? 😎

If the viral loading has any meaning, staying out of hospital for as long as possible would be better. For anything.

On 3d printing chat, work have a co-ordinated plan in the faculty and are estimating printing 500 pieces of PPE a week, pretty cool

dePfeffel '250,00 tests'
Matt Hancock '100,00 tests a day by the end of April'
Sunday 5th April, 16,000 tests, including just 1,000 for NHS staff.

The NHS employs around half a million.
Only another 500 days at yesterdays rate.

Someone at worked asked me for book suggestions and I found this on my bookshelf... :D

Haha looks like highbrow literature for sure!

He was the guy the wrote the novel about the boat that's in the Thames full of explosives. That whole thing fascinated me and I guess I must've bought this along with "Timebomb". SS Montgomery I think is the boat. Google it, crazy stuff.

Go have a look at flightradar now, it's currently around 9-10pm in SE Asia and there's a similar level of flights that are currently over the US.

The myth of Johnson's supposed intelligence does need to be addressed. He has a couple of strengths, none of which he has ever exploited to their full potential:

Arising from a weakness, his lack of confidence, he is good at feeling what others around him feel, and he can use this to fake empathy. He himself has little, because he is too busy dealing with his own problems. Anyway, this is usually what impresses people, because they feel understood.

He makes much of his writing, but to date he has written only total rubbish. If he has ability with words beyond putting unusual words into quotes to make them attract attention, he hasn't shown it.

Having throughout his life been parachuted into cushy jobs, the only real difficulty (apart from his personal problems) that he ever encountered (briefly) was being sacked from the Times, but of course it didn't really matter, as he just carried on inventing stories and producing crap 'journalism'.

He could theoretically be a good orator; he has intermittent good comic timing and is occasionally good with jokes--not consistently, though. Both of those are underdeveloped because he hasn't really done any serious work on them. Good public speaking requires discipline (you're going to deliver a lot of speeches), and that's a pronounced weakness of his.

Needless to say, he's always been protected by the media, e.g. when he was a total and utter failure as 'Mayor of London' (a notoriusly unaccountable position in which he could play-act the politician), mostly because of his laziness and incompetence, but also through the various scandals he caused or is associated with, not to mention his conduct at the London Assembly.

The basic essence of his 'political' life is that he's always been a doormat for corrupt interests to traipse over. This is not likely to change.

Ooof. That’s the measure of him.

Ok now do Dan Hannan and Toby Young plz

Speaking from personal experience, which of course is just anecdote I know, is that in Germany healthcare workers are forever trying to persuade people to check in to a hospital while in many other countries staff are trying to think of any excuse to keep people out.

Germany has a huge medical industry. If you walk into a doctor's surgery there, they'll probably have numerous, German-made medical apparatuses there that they're keen to use, so you'll have tests and whatnot done really quickly, even if you're on state insurance (although, admittedly, there is a considerable difference between private and state insurance medical care). That's not even to mention the pharmaceutic industry, which likewise is very big. Also, there are basic quotas of certain standard operations that German junior doctors have to carry out before they can be promoted, so you're much more likely to get an operation on that basis. While, obviously, medical care is good for people, it's also good for the economy.

Ha, don't know either of those, I'm afraid.

None of that really says anything about his intelligence being 'supposed' or a 'myth'. I don't think many people would claim he's a genius, but in the broad general sense one talks about people being 'intelligent', he definitely is. This is especially apparent when juxtaposed with Trump, who just bloody isn't.

Not that any of what you said there is wrong of course.

You think if Corbyn was in power we would be in a better situation?

Well, I don't think it's a ridiculous question, but you kind of need to break it down into two parts. I think we'd undoubtedly be in a better situation just generally, but on the specific question of coronavirus, we obviously don't know if Corbyn would be a better crisis manager. What I am certain of is that he would have taken it very, very seriously right from the beginning, and that action and planning would have started in earnest much earlier.

It has been observed quite a lot that some of what is needed at the moment is 'socialist' in nature, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that Corbyn wouldn't have shied away from such measures in the way the Tories have been doing.

I should probably have given as background that I don't believe that anyone is more or less intelligent than anyone else, including people with severe learning disabilities, so in a sense I think that the overall idea of 'intelligence' is nonsense. However, there are certain ways in which people create the impression of being 'intelligent', and my post was mainly aimed at explaining how that illusion arises in Johnson's case.