COVID-19

[TFMF]

How is everyone coping with the current crisis?

I’m still working as normal (my company supplies food to vessels so quite critical) but my partner and son are both off indefinitely. 
 

Thankfully no one we know has caught it yet but the UK is definitely getting more severe. 
 

Is everyone ok health and job wise? One our biggest suppliers (very big UK foodservice operator) told us they have £5m worth of stock going out of date very soon - it could break them. 😳

[dBLOOD]

Yeah, 51% of this whole covid thing is fear-mongering unfortunately. The mainstream media spews back any bad news they can find. The fact that 80% of the people getting sick is recovering, the fact that it is the most dangerous to people 50+ years old, none of those information are getting to the public, mainstream media is knowingly driving people into a fear-induced panic. Ever heard the saying 'divide and conquer'? That is exactly what's happening with the social piss-dancing.

I'm the last person who likes or believes in conspiracy-theories, I think people saying the CIA created the virus to do something is stupid and ridiculous, but corporations abusing the situation is obviously a thing. Also there is a reason the US reacted too late to the epidemic, and the reason is money. There is no universal health-care in the US, and the epidemic need global efforts, which means it costs a lot of money to corporations. People in the US don't like to go to the doctor, because it costs them money.

By the way it is a similar situation in the UK, not because of money, but because by the time you get to a doctor, more often than not your condition is way worse than when you realized there is something wrong with your health. I pay taxes here for the last 6 years, and I still did not get to a doctor, and my colon is in my scrotum now.

The way the virus spreads is directly connected to the general hygiene, and the hygiene culture in Asia, the US, or unfortunately here is way worse than in a lot of European countries. I just saw an announcement at my workplace the other day warning people not to spit on the floor in the warehouse! How savage do you have to be to do that?

[TetsuoShima]

All is fine over here. I'm required to work from home most of the time, though at certain times I do still have to go in.

The country has been shut down for the most part for a few weeks already. Still more people are getting sick, half of them because they simply refuse to obey the strict interaction rules set by the non-existent government (I'm not joking, we've been without an officially sanctioned government for almost a year now, what we have is an interim government that doesn't have permission to make any decisions without prior house approval). I'm not even joking, people are holding let's get sick parties... Crazy irresponsible mofo's, I'd revoke their citizenship and deport the lot of them, though that would probably require a complete rewrite of the constitution lmao. If there is one thing politics is good at over here is clogging up the system so nothing gets done and if something does get done it's something no one really wants and making certain that as many things as possible are not allowed, so many that they can't even keep track of it themselves. On top of that, we have a rather large immigrant community, coming from countries where they apparently aren't used to obeying laws and where everybody practically lives in each other's house. Among these communities there are higher than average infection rates because they aren't obeying the social distancing requirements.

This virus is certainly dangerous in the sense that about 1% of the people who get it die from it provided those that get infected do get proper medical care, if proper care is impossible because hospitals and the whole medical system is overwhelmed (as was the case in for example Italy), the death rate is closer to 10%. In contrast, regular flu has a death rate of let's call it 0.1%. Most of the people dying from it are elderly people who have a prior health condition, though not all of them fall in that category. Other people do have a responsibility toward those elderly though, you can't just ignore the fact the disease is more deadly to them simply because you yourself are not in a high risk group. The idea about the measures currently taken is to reduce the speed of the spread of the infection to such an extend that hospitals can keep up. If current predictions are correct, this virus or at the very least, this type of virus is here to stay. It's highly likely that eventually the majority of the population will get exposed. It's predicted this will become yet another seasonal virus, like the flu. Obviously they cannot implement the measures they have in place on a yearly basis. Even though it's not immediately obvious atm, the economy is being crippled by it. If they would take these sort of measures on a yearly basis for several months each year it'd kill economical progress and at one point or the other decisions will have to be made to keep the economy going as currently expenses are up and revenue is down, that cannot continue for any prolonged period of time without going bankrupt.

The incredible early ease of the spread of the virus in Europe and the US can be attributed to mostly two things, stupidity excluded. 1. There areas are not governed by totalitarian regimes, meaning, they can't just keep people indoors and implement a complete lock down. 2. In Europe and the US it's common for people who are sick to just go ahead with life while being sick (and as a result spread their infection all over), instead of staying home for the duration of their illness. In fact, most companies have regulations in place that if you call in sick a few days too often, you can go look for another job when you come back to work, which also forces people to just go to work while being sick, unless they're so sick they can't see straight anymore. The same thing goes for schools. In developed Asian countries it's far more common to stay home while sick and they also have a tradition to wear mouth masks while sick, to reduce the risk they spread the infection they're carrying. When's the last time you saw someone who had a cold wearing a face mask in Europe? Never? On top of that, developed Asian countries are far more organised than European countries, they get shit done, while over here they debate over what to do until the decision has been made for them. South-Korea is a prime example.

[TFMF]

The media definitely doesn’t help. But what’s worse is SOCIAL media. Did you know 50% of Facebook users are Virologists, and the other 50% are legal experts?

so many arrogant pricks thinking they know the lifecycle of the virus and how to stay safe (or thinking it’ll just give them a mild cough so no need to worry about staying indoors). 

i want to get rid of Facebook so much... but just can’t bring myself to do it. I must secretly enjoy the negativity. 
 

I hate people.