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London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

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411–420 of 448 posts

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#411
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the case when the hosts are all in good shape (compared to even 200 years ago) and use "artificial" means to stay alive longer?

In good shape? When half the population of the western world is obese, and 10% are diabetic? How many people, on average, were on the brink of starvation 200 years ago? We're still better off, I'd guess, but it's not that amazing

Hmm, you've got a point, but what kind of "obese" are we talking? Usually people conflate obese with overweight.

Being (slightly) overweight is generally good for health, especially when combating a virus.

200+ years ago the vast majority of people were definitely starved for nutrients, living off whatever they could get locally, with very little meat compared to today.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#412
post #174
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I know a family where every member tested positive for COVID in the spring with severe symptoms at the time. They recovered, then over thanksgiving they started experiencing very mild symptoms (some none at all, others loss of taste and smell to more typical cold like symptoms), and all tested positive once again. It might be that after you contracted COVID once, or a particular strain of COVID once, that…

>but this certainly doesn't bode well How doesn't it bode well? If you get one strain of covid, get over it, then catch another strain and your symptoms are much less than the first time due to your body having the proper defenses against covid, then that's your immune system working as intended.

It doesn't bode well for people who have lung scarring and neurological damage.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#413
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent amount of it is unintentional I suspect. Subconcious fiddling, poor feeling / awareness of slipping masks... a gentle reminder that "your mask has slipped a bit" can do wonders.

Similarly, a gentle reminder when one's dick accidentally slips out of one's trousers is also appreciated.

Too rarely does good, cutting satire grace HN.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some responses to that will be (in the spirit of) coughing in the speaker's face.

So far nobody's coughed in my face, in spirit or otherwise.

Seen a guy on the street taking off mask to do giant sneeze, put it back on afterwards promptly. His wife facepalmed. To his defence he’d probably have to wear juicy mask if he didn’t do it.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#415
post #70

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…

I think the problem is that people don’t want to enforce it because 1 in 50 people you try this on are likely to go batshit insane almost instantly. No one wants to deal with that. At the end of the day this whole thing is dependent on the weakest link and there are a lot of weak links in society.

I have been to Gran Canaria recently and good luck trying not wearing a mask in a shop over there :)

I think the general more aggressive Spanish way of communicating helps a lot.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#416
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50% where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last…

Are you serious? The tube and overground is about 25% no masks in the morning for me.

very serious, during the day and evening, between zone 1 and eastern zone 2, I see extremely high compliance. it appears to vary enormously by area, which is very surprising to me.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with you in principle, except that Japan and Korea are at temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

Not sure why you are all focusing on my example with the weather. Like I said there are many factors involved here, with the weather being one of them.

I completely agree with your overall point, that there are too many confounding factors to reliably attribute anything to government actions. I guess I just couldn't resist the urge to nit.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that's also true independent of whether I prove it. This is so different from my point that I'm not sure how it relates. I am confident there is literal treasure near to where I live, because I've seen very convincing evidence of dredging from multiple sources. In my mind, it is proven. But, I'm not acting on that because I don't find it worthwhile. On the other hand, if a stranger told me there was a police traffic…

You're acting based on your priors and new evidence. You have a high prior for police stops existing in general, and a low one for people randomly lying about it, so a stranger saying there's one that way is compelling evidence to you. You have a high prior on the existence of treausure nearvy, but a low one of the existence of treasure worth the effort of finding, so me telling you you could get rich quick isn't com…

This no longer has anything to do with 'burden of proof', which I continue to reject as a concept (maybe you are agreeing with me?).

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning to keep the reproduction rate as close to 1 as possible is the most efficient way to generate new strains, so they have the same root cause anyway.

I did hear one minister describe a replication rate below 1 as budget available to spend.

Exactly.

I've heard it said that this mutation increases the replication rate by 0.4.

If we can keep this under control, we could have instead originally had a replication rate of 0.6 and the pandemic would be long over - with no mutated strain.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#420
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These comparisons are so lax. NZ is in summer right now, and is a remote island on the other side of the planet from Italy where the virus first really went crazy. The U.K. government is beyond contempt, but these comparisons don’t help. NZ is not an international flight hub. Heathrow was the busiest airport in Europe prior to COVID (it is not anymore).

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. NZ has done exceptionally well and I don't want to take away from it at all! But it would be dishonest to say that they faced challenges of the same magnitude.

I suggest that New Zealand is the most comparable country to the UK in its challenges - being islands dependent on outside trade and with an economy heavy on services and tourism. (plus, NZ's primary trading partner is China).

They haven't faced challenges of the same magnitude only because they took action to stop an outbreak from starting, at the earliest opportunity. That's the only meaningful difference in how things have played out.

They passed the same challenges that the UK failed.

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