Covid Test Data Breach: 1.3M Patient Records Exposed Online

> Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp which made international news.

Thanks, I didn't hear about that.

> Over what is essentially a flu, which we knew from the data at the time.

Maybe 1000 people had prior exposure to a SARS clade coranavirus. And if you think they are essentially the same you certainly haven't been reading the news and analysis that I have.

E.g. https://www.webmd.com/covid/news/20230217/covid-versus-flu-w...

> Kills as much, and the same people, what gives?

In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.

> I also remember CNN not touching the lab-leak "because Trump" and with a straight face they claim it's his fault they're not doing their jobs and getting to the truth.

Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes. And given all of the crap that's happened with wildlife to human transmission in the past (SARS 1, MERS, metapneumovirus, bird flu, swine flu, mpox, hemorrhagic viruses) there are other important avenues of transmission to deal with in addition to safe laboratory and sample collection practices.

> I remember press conferences telling vaccinated people not to hug their unvaccinated loved ones. Why not when it's 100%, 95%, 90%, kind of%, maybe% effective?

Injected vaccination (getting a shot into your muscle) was only really going to help with duration of symptoms (potentially shutting COVID down when it's just the sniffles, if you're lucky). It's much worse at preventing transmission than mucosal vaccination is. If you want to protect others, wear a mask. If you want to protect yourself, a quality mask is better, but a vaccine is okay.

> and there's a reason it just disappeared almost overnight.

Yeah, I was really pissed when the California government dropped both masking and social distancing at the same time, just in time for Delta to hit, once the first vaccines had been out for ~ 3 months.

I'm also pissed at the wishy-washyness of talking heads when asked whether masks are recommended again around the holiday season. Well fitting and well used masks are superior to vaccination. If you're willing to use them, then use them! If you're only willing to use them when someone else says it's a good idea...I just really don't get it.

Despite thinking that those were generally good ideas, I'd still call that a camp.

Sure.

Mandatory quarantine is still serious business though, and deserves to be seen as such. Two weeks can be a long time, even over a life time.

Some of these camps also facilitated spread among the denizens (particularly the ones set up in hotels). That's worth remembering.

Yes, it does count as burglary and you would still be a victim of burglary regardless of if you left your front door unlocked.

Insurance might decide to not cover you for not having a minimum level of control in place, but you are still a victim of burglary.

> I have no problem showing ID to my local bank though

Me neither. But they normalized this behavior when moving to mobile apps for netbanks by requiring people to photograph their IDs and take selfies for KYC.

After all this KYC stuff, photographing personal documents became normal and then many other big tech companies started requiring this stuff. I think even Facebook started asking people to send pictures of IDs to verify accounts. I know phone companies in EU started doing this.

I still refuse doing it for all these trivial services and it has a real cost in that it prevents me from using several services. At some point I will probably have to do it.

In my country, we recently had a real estate agency who got hacked and had all their KYC stuff exposed and sold for ID theft. It is a huge mess. The company then reached out to all the persons that were affected by mail telling them that this happened and that they should contact them immediately. So I contacted them. First step when contacting them was them requiring to prove my identity by sending photo of my personal ID again. Yeah, fool me once....