I thought the minority that the Finns were all agitated about were the Swedes.
Of course, everything I know about Finland I learned from years in Duluth, MN plus the TV show Jättekiva.
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India on Saturday reported a daily record of 145,384 new infections as Covid-19 raced out of control.
The Kiwis 
have banned travel from India for two weeks; 2/3’s of the cases in Managed Isolation Quarantine were arriving from India, as many as 10 in a day and this has been linked to a new case of COVID in Auckland. Reactions to the ban are… understandably mixed.
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Meanwhile, here in Ontario 
, our Solicitor General appears to be the one in charge of the vaccine roll-out. That was news to me. This Thursday she revealed why we are in this dumpster fire.
Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said Thursday, about why the government didn’t believe what scientists were telling them? “We wanted to make sure that the modelling was actually showing up in our hospitals.” Well, they made sure.
Nothing like standing on the train tracks and demanding proof that the 8:35 is actually going to hit you…
I was surprised to find out a decade ago that mathematical equations have no standing in law. I never expected he knock-on effects of this would kill thousands of people…
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If I was in a near-zero covid area such as New Zealand or Australia right now I’d probably wait for a lower risk vaccine to be available rather that take the 1.1/100000 chance of the blood clot thing from AstraZenica:
Interesting note towards the end of the article about how a lower dose of the vaccine may be safer and also more effective. Really brings home how hard it must be to come up with the optimal dose level during development. I guess they just take their best guess, do a trial with that dosage, and if the results seem good they say “yep, that’s a good dosage. Let’s stick with that.”
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Our right-wing nuts are strongly influenced by American right-wing nuttery, thanks to the internet. During the 2020 US elections, and afterwards, the social media and comment sections on news sites were full of Trumpists. They’ve mostly fallen silent (I think a fair number of them were fakes in the first place), but we’ve also got plenty of Covidiots repeating American lies, etc. Isn’t the Disinformation Highway grand?
And yes, beyond this stuff, we’ve got entirely homegrown racism. Finland has been very mono-ethnic outside the few major cosmopolitan cities, Helsinki and in the pre-War days Viipuri foremost of them, and until '90s black people, for example, were a genuine rarity in most of the country. Things have changed, thanks to immigration from Russia and Estonia, plus refugees from Somalia and Middle-East, plus increasing numbers of international exchange students and people from abroad moving here to work in Finnish companies, but it’s a recent change – I’m about 40, and I’ve seen a lot of it during my lifetime.
It’s not a serious thing anymore. About a century ago? Yeah, definitely back then. But these days, it’s mostly about sports rivalry, particularly in ice hockey, plus some envy / bad national self-esteem about the Swedes being wealthier and all around better off than us, frequently w. grumbling about how they’ve been using us as a buffer for ages.
If you want genuine, pervasive racism, Romanis are unsurprisingly a big target. Sami people, too, but in their case it’s very rarely personal mistrust or animosity, and more systemic smothering of their culture and languages, even today.
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‘You Can’t Trust Anyone’: Russia’s Hidden Covid Toll Is an Open Secret
And next please, a story like that in the NY Times on how the hidden U.S. number is also far higher.
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Megan McArdle talks about ~500 k extra deaths in the US in 2020, ~345 k directly attributed to COVID and the most of the other ~158 k being related to COVID.
It is not close to the amount reported about Russia (100 k official and extra 300 k), but i have no idea about how much the fact that Russia is much poorer than the US, and consequently has less money for testing, impacts the numbers (i think that Brazil probably will have numbers close to Russia due the same problems[1]).
The article about Russia is a bit russophobic and it seems to assume that every missing data is intentionally made to create a image of a better response by russia and not a limitation of the data collection itself, while ignoring that both also happen in the US.
[1]: Brazil also has a problem that the federal government denies the pandemic and do much less than necessary to control it.
But even in the states that took a serious response, there were a lot of shortages of tests to diagnose every possible case.
For example, my city has a positivity rate around 50 %, and the main limitation is the number of test being made not a desire to underestimate the number of cases.
ETA: 1. Forgot to mention that the data was about 2020.
2. updated the data about my city positivity rate (i was estimating it about the daily variation, but i was forgetting that i could just use the total numbers of tests and positives.
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Our numbers are likely an undercount too. We’re getting closer to 600,000, too.
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The common problem of brain fog after covid sounds suspiciously like chemo brain:
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Or it’s just statistical noise.
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Or like good old ADHD
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What’s that line about them being the dumbest branch?
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