BBO Discussion Forums: Coronavirus - BBO Discussion Forums

Although the EU is clearly right to ban travel from the US, Brazil, and Russia, my youngest son hasn't been able to be with his fiancée for several months now. She lives and works in Berlin and they have a place there. Last year he had been able to be in Berlin three of every eight weeks. For a time it looked like things might loosen up at the beginning of July, but that's not happening.

He's looking at meeting her in a responsible country where they could quarantine together for a couple of weeks and then be eligible to travel to Berlin. But that means finding a safe way to travel to meet her.

I'm really irritated with the folks who voted to put an irresponsible moron in the White House. That it would turn out badly should not be a surprise.

An epidemiologist, an ICU doctor and a scientist all walk into a bar.

I’m just kidding, they know better.

In response to a question about how long antibodies might offer some protection against infection, Fauci said Monday "we do not know."

"With this spike protein that's being presented in the way that we do it with primes and in some cases boosts, we're going to assume that there's a degree of protection, but we have to assume that it's going to be finite," he added during a Q&A discussion with Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. "It's not going to be like a measles vaccine."

[url="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dr-fauci-says-coronavirus-immunity-may-be-finite-duration-remains-uncertain/ar-BB16pwIb?li=BBnb7Kz"]Dr. Fauci With 7+ billion people in the world, by the time everybody is vaccinated the 1st time, it may be past the time when the 1st recipients need to get a 2nd shot, etc.

Lately I've started thinking about what life was like before "modern medicine". In those days, when people got sick, they often died. Women frequently died during childbirth, and many children didn't make it to adulthood.

This was all just an accepted fact of life, people didn't go to extreme measures to try to avoid it. Families had lots of children so that they would be ensured that some would make it. They knew that many diseases were infectious, even though the mechanism (bacteria and virus spread) wasn't known, but they didn't practice "social distancing".

Probably the only reason there weren't enormous pandemics was that few people travelled outside their local areas.

Have we become so spoiled by modern medicine that we can't imagine a life like that? Are we going to be stuck wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart from each other because of this?

Have we become so spoiled by modern medicine that we can't imagine a life like that? Are we going to be stuck wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart from each other because of this?

Eek, this is starting to look really bleak.

Lately I've started thinking about what life was like before "modern medicine". In those days, when people got sick, they often died. Women frequently died during childbirth, and many children didn't make it to adulthood.

This was all just an accepted fact of life, people didn't go to extreme measures to try to avoid it. Families had lots of children so that they would be ensured that some would make it. They knew that many diseases were infectious, even though the mechanism (bacteria and virus spread) wasn't known, but they didn't practice "social distancing".

Probably the only reason there weren't enormous pandemics was that few people travelled outside their local areas.

Have we become so spoiled by modern medicine that we can't imagine a life like that? Are we going to be stuck wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart from each other because of this?

I just discovered a Masters thesis by a Vanderbilt English student. "THE 1918 INFLUENZA PANDEMIC IN LITERATURE AND MEMORY" by Caroline Hovanec" It concerns literature written at the time of the influenza pandemics between 1918 and 1935. The thesis was written before this pandemic. It makes a fascinating read. I think it may have been published in the journal 'Literature and Medicine' 29:1 Spring 2011. as "Of Bodies, Families, and Communities:
Refiguring the 1918 Influenza Pandemic" Here is a link. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/449360/pdf Outstanding piece of work.

FYP and the answer is yes. Spoiled, in this sense, to me means not being able to look past your own desires. It is a self-serving approach that is common to adolescence and childhood - when we all think we are our personal center of the universe. It requires real growth to understand that we are all part of a community and that what is best for the community is more important that an individual want.

Where did you get the idea that my post was from a selfish point of view like that? If we were to stop these extreme measures, I think I would be just as likely as anyone else to catch the virus.

"This is a party held by somebody diagnosed with the COVID virus and the thought is that people get together to see if the virus is real and if anyone gets infected," Appleby said. "Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said 'I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it's not.'"

Patient Dies After Going to 'COVID Party,' Thought It Was a Hoax: Official


If this was a Republican politician, I would nominate them for a Darwin award.

I've seen that same article

I am extremely skeptical.
It's just too precious.

It's not just the whole COVID party meme (there's been a lot of fake claims about this), but the whole dying last words thing...

I can potentially believe that there maybe something similar to COVID parties (bunches of idiots who believe that they're immune, who are having a party, and acting like jack assess). But random person gets COVID at one such party, then dies, then makes a deathbed convention with those words...

Nah

Hilarious, You must have lived a very cloistered life. Although it is true that 10% of the population is really clever. This, of course, means that at the other end of the normal distribution people can have some incredibly strange ideas. And they believe them very strongly.


It used to be a 'thing' when I was a child to send your children to the home of someone infected with measles or mumps. The idea was if they caught it when they were young it was less of a problem. I suspect that something similar may be happening here. Unfortunately, COVID19 is completely different. As I noted earlier many young people in the United States already have severe co-morbidities.

After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended widespread use of face masks to help slow the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, the minimalist medical mask quickly got reimagined as a fashion accessory. Then model Naomi Campbell—a famous germaphobe—and musician Erykah Badu stepped it up a notch, sporting custom hazmat suits for stylish social distancing. Now, with the novel coronavirus pandemic showing no sign of slowing, travelers are taking note.

Yezin Al-Qaysi says haute hazmats are just the thing to make flying feel safe again. In mid-April the co-founder of VYZR Technologies, a Toronto-based company specializing in personal protective gear, launched a new product called the BioVYZR via crowdfunding site Indiegogo. The $250, futuristic-looking outer layer resembles the top half of an astronaut’s uniform, with anti-fogging “windows” and a built-in hospital-grade air-purifying device. Paranoid flyers were quick to scoop it up, pre-ordering about 50,000 suits and raising $400,000 for the nascent company. The first batch is set to be delivered by the end of July.

...

Brooke Berlin, founder of Karoo Consulting, which focuses on business development for African travel companies, spends a lot of time in the air but isn’t sold on the BioVYZR. “I’ve been 1K with United for the past five years,” she says. “I will always wear a mask in public, but I have no interest in spending money—which could otherwise be used to support conservation and community efforts—on a protective suit, or playing into the fear of being around people or traveling by wearing something so extreme.”

Hillary France, founder of Brand Assembly, a business platform built to accelerate fashion and lifestyle brands, believes the fancy hazmat suit will have a moment and then fade quickly. “I don’t think this will replace the face mask as the garment we will put into the Covid-19 time capsule, but it is nice to be able to see someone’s smile,” she says.

The celebrity buy-in of stylish protective suits has others thinking that this hazmat suit is more than a fashion fad. Meredith Del Bello Zec, a mother of two young children who works as a New York-based buyer for Erica Wilson, a fashion boutique in Nantucket, Mass., says she’d invest in a BioVYZR.

“We’re in a moment where supermodels are traveling in full hazmat suits, so function and safety are, thankfully, the focus over all else—aesthetics included,” she explains. “That said, fashion will embrace this as it did with masks, and we will likely start to see versions of this type of gear evolve from designers at every level. I personally would look forward to a version that would be easy to wear when wrangling children on airplanes and through airports.”

Source: Jen Murphy at Bloomberg

Anyone want to make a bet when pubs will get closed again in large parts of England? No matter how long I look at https://coronavirus-...a.gov.uk/deaths, it doesn't scream "OPEN THE PUBS" to me...

Update: A few weeks later, I have been staring at case counts to figure out whether opening pubs was a good idea. I really can't decide.