Continuing coronavirus happenings (Part 2)

general topics
4927

Thanks for posting this.

I’m not competent to judge if the reported science is correct, but there are serveral things about the article that make me uneasy–as if I were reading highly sophisticated disinformation.

I’ll have to re-read it with a more critical eye, but I can’t help noticing how well its criticisms of countries, institutions and even individuals align with, for example, the priorities of the late US administration.

If nothing else, the author himself definitely has an axe to grind. Throughout the piece, he’s careful to point out that there is no direct evidence for either scenario, but later criticizes media outlets that haven’t treated the escape scenario with the seriousness he thinks appropriate as “left” and “ideological”:

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence.

The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

It’s interesting and informative, but I’m nervous about it.

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4928

This is a big part of what gives me pause. “Chinese government sucks” seems to be a large part of the premise. While I agree that the tight seals on information instituted by said government are a really bad look, I am not ready to accept that as definitive proof. The David Baltimore quote absolutely caused me to pause, and the discussion of furin cleavage site is tough to blow off. I am neither a virologist nor a geneticist, but I do know folks who are deeply involved in those fields. I am seeking feedback from them and will report back.

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4929

The thing about the lab escape theory that has never made any sense to me is this: “If that is the case, sure, I can see why the government of China would want to hide that information from the world. But surely they would have done their own, very thorough internal investigations and cleaned house, right?”

I mean, there would have been executions for that kind of screwup. Now, we don’t know that there weren’t executions, and it will probably be a while before we do know, if ever. Still, it sounds like the kind of thing that would have generated at least some chatter within the upper echelons of power in China, and that foreign intelligence services would have likely picked up on that.

It also takes quite a few leaps of logic to assume that either the government falsified information about who first came down with the disease and where or intentionally infected many people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market to cover their tracks concerning the sloppy work at the lab by making it look like the first outbreak was elsewhere. But if they had the wherewithal to do that, then why weren’t they better able to respond to the virus at the time? They can’t move the outbreak from the lab to the market unless they know about the lab outbreak in the first place, but knowing about the lab outbreak should have left them much better prepared to contain the virus. Otherwise, why was there an outbreak at the market? Did a lab technician happen to go there after getting sick? It seems like a lot of effort to cover up a lab incident that, had they know of, they could have contained much more easily.

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4930

That’s not what people think, that’s what Trumpies accuse people of. What people think is that there is no reason to believe Trump speaks the truth or knows what he’s talking about. That’s a very different proposition and one which was evidenced every time he opened his lying, ignorant mouth. Next up is the esteemed author going to opine on the merit of shining a light up your arsehole too?

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4931

this is only indirectly about the pandemic. it’s about the effect on the labor market of both the pandemic as well as the various supports in place to help mitigate the economic harms of it. this is also a good example why i love john cole at the balloon juice blog:

"Unless you live underneath a rock, the last couple of days you have witnessed a genuine freakout from the chattering classes about the jobs report. To save you some time, I will summarize:

“OMG 300 DOLLARS MORE A WEEK IS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO FORCE THE POORS TO CLEAN THE GREASE TRAPS AT MY FAST FOOD FRANCHISE FOR A WAGE TOO LOW FOR THEM TO PAY THE RENT!”

And really, I am not exaggerating. Shitty, low paying jobs are not being filled, and it is FREAKING out the MBA class. We are at a point where several generations of businesses and business owners have never actually experience a tight labor market, and they literally have no idea what to do. Since the Reagan era, they have been in the driver’s seat, neutering labor unions, having MBA’s nickle and dime employees to death with suppressed wages, cutting away at medical and retirement benefits, shifting them to 401k’s while not providing commensurate pay increases, and so forth. They’ve spent four decades masturbating about being job creators while siphoning all the profit upward, treating employees like indentured servants eager to work 35 hours a week for 8 bucks an hour with no stable schedule, so with employees not willing to literally die during a pandemic to smell like french fries and walmart working the two jobs they need to survive, these shitlords finally find themselves without enough workers.

The one thing they can not find themselves willing to try to do is to try to pay them more. You’ll hear anecdotal stories about McDonald’s owners paying a whole 12 dollars an hour for an “entry level job,” sneering while saying it because everyone knows an entry level position shouldn’t pay enough for the serf to pay rent AND eat. So fuck them.

My suggestion to the government is to not do ANYTHING except push for a 15$ minimum wage, and these assholes will either figure it out on their own and start paying people what thy are worth, start picking the tampons out of their own Burger King bathroom toilets themselves, or go out of business. All of these are fine by me.

These guys can go McFuck themselves."

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4932

Not just McJobs either. One of our suppliers (aerospace industry) was lamenting that the relief bill funds had left them unable to retain technicians at the rate they were willing to pay, and this was the cause for their failure to meet delivery schedule. They claimed that people were more willing to take unemployment over their shitty wages, and the relief bill funds put them over the edge.

On a telecon with them I recommended to our supply chain managers that “unwillingness to pay competitive wage” should be considered a risk item when evaluating a supplier. That didn’t go over too well.

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4933

Amen to that!
And anytime I hear people justifying the low wages by saying they are jobs meant for Highschool students, I wonder why those places are even open when school is in session? Aren’t they then encouraging truancy? I don’t get it, at all.

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4934

Thanks. Cathartic!

Also has some good ammo for FBook friends and relatives currently carping about lazy people sitting on couches while the unemployment wealth flows in. Instead of blaming etc etc.

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4935

Yes, and!!! And, for people to be collecting unemployment, they need to have had their employment terminated. So, those employers basically cut their low-wage workers loose during a global pandemic, and now they’re complaining that they can’t get those workers back?
“Where’s the loyalty?” /s

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4936

i imagine not. living in texas, i find myself engaged in conversation with people like your supply chain managers, even if they’re “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who make do with marginally better than minimum wage jobs themselves.

my best understanding is that a lot of people who tout capitalism and “the free market” really only like them when they work in their favor. for situation where the labor market would rationally dictate higher wages there’s suddenly a chorus of cries like “laziness” or “socialism”. it would be funny if it weren’t hurting so many people.

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4937

@Jesse13927 @anon29537550 @d_r re. Bulletin story on the origin of COVID …but also @navarro re. labour market…

I’ve seen enough nonsense in the western scientific world, Ph.D.'s granted for zero-th order correct analysis of known completely contaminated data, researchers publishing garbage even after I did them the personal favour of debugging the software giving them the desired but completely wrong results… heck, I missed my first choice for a Ph.D. because a bunch of Canadian profs swiped a visiting Russian prof’s work and the Russian went postal… It’s not like politics and stupidity doesn’t win versus scientific process here as well, it’s human nature, wretched, but there it is.

Now, mix that with a broad culture where you look after your own interests first because you are seen as readily replaceable, and you can go from virologist to the labour camp (or chain gang, or fast food outlet) in a heartbeat.

Now, consider that your job may depend solely on the approval of a boss who is ultimately there on the approval of a real estate developer or a chemical or civil engineer, or maybe the co-developer of soft-ice cream, or (heck, why not?) high school drug dealer… basically someone there for reasons other than their deep appreciation of virology.

The Wuhan lab article describes a possible chain of events that has a slightly more Chinese than western flavour to it, but I think we have to admit that elements of both this, and indeed the entire COVID-19 story, are simply, if painfully, human. I found the article compelling, perhaps I’m not as attuned to the political filters at play in the U.S., but I look forward to further specialist observations.

It was news to me that virologists are performing “gain-of-function experiments” with little therapeutic value. I grew up around nuclear research, in a town that suffered the effects of more than one incident, so I find that more than a bit alarming. Leadership matters, even when (especially when?) dealing with very smart people.

A friend who was a former submariner said that they watch any incident report from any navy with a strong sense of empathy… I think that kind of reaction is going to have to win over the instinct to blame if we’re going to get to the bottom of this.

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4938

20210509_120554

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4939

Ugh. Ivermectin looks like it’s the new Hydroxychloroquine. The same people are pushing it (the Koch death network) even though no initial research has been completed, but still claiming wildly successful results, and chowing down on Ivermectin meant for animal use.

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4940

I am actually going to go a step further. One should always apply a little extra skepticism to scientific stories that people really want to be true. Sometimes that results in people looking for evidence until they can’t help but get it, as has happened with some traditional medicines. And very often it results in reporting above what was actually found, like evidence for life on Mars or beer being healthy for you.

Somewhere between Donald Trump saying so, wanting someone other than him and his fellow right-wing sociopaths to blame, anti-China sentiment, anti-research sentiment, and I think just a general idea that nature wouldn’t do this to us, there has been a lot of desire for this virus to be artificial, and I would read stories accordingly.

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4941

The politicization of what should be a neutral forensic issue is just more fallout of the breakdown in our social fabric over the last few years.

The other thing in the article that grabbed me (besides the Baltimore quote) was the deep dive into the Feb. 2020 Lancet letter, which was the basis for the confidence many of us have had in our beliefs on the matter. Natural conflict-of-interest principles seem to have been seriously violated there.

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4942

One of the three doctors of the main group promoting Ivermectin.

I noticed that their press events are usually hosted by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is TA-DA! part of the Koch-funded State Policy Network.

https://trashpanda-x.github.io/darklantern/#Idaho%20Freedom%20Foundation

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4943

Even without political filters, it goes without saying that the political ramifications of the virus’ origin are enormous. If the lab escape theory is proven to be true, it would be a bigger deal than Chernobyl. All that we have seen so far is the suggestion that it could possibly have escaped from a lab, and as you say, human error makes this all too plausible.

What I find much less plausible is that the Chinese government did not know about it, even after the fact, while the virus coincidentally went from the lab to the seafood market OR that the Chinese government did know about it and, rather than responding to it, decided to cover it up by falsifying cases (or intentionally infecting people) from the seafood market. I am not defending the Chinese government (what they are doing to the Uyghur people in Xinjiang is awful), but the first explanation seems like quite a coincidence, while the second scenario just has no rhyme or reason to it.

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4944

The tabloid Iltalehti reports that based on Sunday’s figures from the public health institute THL, the coronavirus incidence rate has now fallen below 10 in five regions of Finland.

The incidence rate is the number of cases recorded during the previous 14 days per 100,000 residents.

The national incidence rate on Sunday was 52.7, with the highest level recorded in Päijät-Häme (108.7). The incidence rate was also high in Southwest Finland (94) and in the Helsinki and Uusimaa hospital district (85.2).

The incidence rate was under 10 in the hospital districts of Central Finland, North Savo, South Savo, Lapland, and Central Ostrobothnia.

The paper also combines figures first and second jabs to report that over two million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been given to the public in Finland. Over 1.9 million have had their first dose, and more than 200,000 have had a second injection. That translates as 34.9 percent of the population having received the first dose, and 3.8 percent their second.

Covid deniers gathering

Tampere’s Aamulehti reports that there was a gathering of close to 100 people in that city on Saturday who came together in their shared denial of the existence of the coronavirus pandemic.

The paper says that judging from images shared on social media platforms, participants did not observe social distancing or wear masks at the event.

The day’s programme, which Aamulehti also sourced from social media, lasted a full day and included a well-known conspiracy theorist of the Finnish QAnon movement, the former editor-in-chief of an anti-immigration and conspiracy website, and Mikael Kivivuori, a doctor from Rauma who was recently fired from his private helathcare-sector job for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

Aamulehti writes that it was unable to determine who organised the event and so was unable to reach an organiser for comment. The premises were hired from a local choral group which was unaware of the nature of the gathering in advance.

Public gatherings in Tampere are still restricted to no more than 10 people. Violations may be subject to fines. Police Inspector Pasi Nieminen told Aamulehti that police will look into possible violations at the gathering.

“The police consider such activities as irresponsible and childish. The fact is that people are still dying from the coronavirus,” Nieminen said.

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