Coronavirus

[CTG]

Beyond the news in your country, please share your thoughts and experiences regarding the current COVID-19 panic and local restrictions.

In Hungary, official news are as dumb as usual:
- there is strong connection between COVID infections and migration (powered by George Soros), because the first two registered people were Iranian students
- those students behave scandalously in the hospital and will be banned from the country
- as for me, governmental communication is just like in a blind dictature (of course we can handle everything! - uhm well, sure... The Hungarian public health system alone is a disaster, even without COVID)
- late decisions about the closure of schools
- implementation of some new rules just fails (e.g. restrictions on crossing the country borders)
- the shitty Hungarian football league is still running

Meanwhile it turned out again that the Hungarian moral is fuckin' low...

At least my workplace handles this situation more of less correctly by providing 50% home office, quite strict self-quarantine rules (with a long "you must stay at home, if..." list), restricting live meetings, providing hand sanitizers for all departments, etc.

[dreadnaut]

I'm across two countries, being in one and talking to my family in the other. Italy has it tought, but at least where I'm from the situation is ok: food shops open, letting people in one or two at the time, limited or no panicking people buying all the stuff. Elsewhere, I hear, it's more complicated and difficult.

The government in the UK is saying there's nothing to worry about, and they'll close some things in the next weeks, but jolly good, keep doing things as normal. On the other hand, sport associations have closed everything, and any company or university that can have people working from home is doing so. This might be more noticeable where I am in Scotland, because there's a lot of foreign people, each with horror stories from their home country.

I'm working from home full time from Monday. The company let us choose, and I see no reason to share a small space with some who come out of the loo too fast from having actually washed hands. I also think the only reason things are not locked down immediately is to balance victims with economy downturn. Since I'm privileged enough to be able to work from home, I should do my duty to reduce the number of people passing germs outside.

[Duplode]

I'm across two countries, being in one and talking to my family in the other. Italy has it tought, but at least where I'm from the situation is ok: food shops open, letting people in one or two at the time, limited or no panicking people buying all the stuff. Elsewhere, I hear, it's more complicated and difficult.

Italy sure looks scary right now. My thoughts go to y'all who are or have loved ones there.

Here we are a few days behind the curve, but it's most definitely coming. On the one hand, unlike several other branches of the federal government under the current administration, the health ministry wasn't gutted, or handed to stooges, so there's still hope the official response won't be a complete shitshow. On the other hand, there still is plenty of idiocy going around.

At work, there will be a meeting tomorrow, and contingency measures are already on the horizon, though remote work is pretty much uncharted territory at our organisation. At a minimum, the events we promote for the general public are to be suspended (significantly, a large share of their audience is 60+).

[Cas]

Hi, guys. Well, we're all having this thing. I think the world hasn't been as homogeneous for a long time!

In Argentina, things are not very different from what happens in other countries in the region or what happened weeks ago in Europe. At the beginning, it was "Alright, only a few cases and they all came from abroad. Don't worry, the virus isn't that deadly" and it has gradually evolved to people crowding in the supermarkets and the current regime finally accepting that it's better for children not to go to school after the ministry of health spoke several unfortunate statements. Workers are still allowed to go to work normally, except 60 year olds or older, but many companies have chosen to take their own measures and, whenever possible, have their employees work from home.

I have been working from home for four years, so nothing has changed in my case. Employees are not afraid of the very likely future event in which they will be told to stay home, because with this regime, they surely will be given fully-paid leave and employers are not allowed to easily fire anybody. They don't see that if this extends long, companies will start to go bankrupt and they will end up jobless anyway. Besides the economic concern, people wonder if the speed at which cases will multiply will be slow enough for the health system to manage them. My guess is it won't, but on the good side, if things happen fast, at least they will be briefer. As long as one doesn't get seriously ill during that peak, they will be able to get the necessary medical attention. At least, this is what we hope.

So, yes, Argentina is also reacting too slow, but as I've said, this has a bad and a good side. Let us protect our old folks and take care of not getting sick of something else during this outbreak. It could be more dangerous to, say, get a gastroenteritis precisely now, that the health system is in jeopardy, than catching a CoViD19, which miiiight kill you, but most likely, will not.

[CTG]

All you have to know about Vik(ta)tor Orbán:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/01/europe/coronavirus-and-the-threat-to-democracy-intl/index.html

Meanwhile, our district became far the most infected region in Hungary. 14% of the overall Hungarian cases were registered here, while the population of the district gives only 0.9% of the country.

[Overdrijf]

In the Netherlands we're now getting to the phase where we feel the outbreak is under control and at least as long as the current measures last the virus will not overload our health system. (The hospitals are still in emergency mode, with lots of extra beds and equipment, but it looks like we won't be needing an even bigger emergency mode, which is good because that was going to get tricky.) So with the immediate problems under control researchers can look a little further, and they found that based on the statistics of how many people die now vs in a regular year we're probably under-reporting the amount of corona deaths by about a factor 2.

Now we have been a little short on tests, but overall we're not really the most disorganized country ever, so it could well be the case that the numbers for a bunch of other countries are off by roughly the same factor or more.

Another bit of semi-recent results showed 40% of our old people homes had had at least one corona infection. So that raises quite a few questions about how far and wide the disease has actually spread.

It's still a little surreal. I know people in say Afghanistan will feel differently about this, but over here at least this thing is easily the biggest crisis since World War 2. Not just in terms of response and measures, the amount of people dying per week now is higher than it has been since the end of the war. (Of course the amount of old people that were alive was pretty high as well, and we really haven't had a lot of deadly stuff happen to us since then.)


On a more personal note to people like CTG who live in the risky areas: stay safe, or at least let your older relatives stay safe.

[CTG]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/08/11/107-year-old-nj-woman-beats-coronavirus-after-surviving-childhood-case-of-spanish-flu/

The real world Unbreakables... 

[Cas]

I read the article posted by CTG just today. Amazing!

An update of the thing here... I have seen in media not just from Argentina, but from other countries, that Argentina's quarantine has been "the longest in the world" in those words. I don't really know if that's accurate. For instance, I understand that Colombia has been in quarantine for approximately the same amount of time and most countries, I'm not sure. But I can say it definitely is long and still ongoing. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that we went into very strict lockdown at a time when there was a very tiny amount of cases so the thing got slowed down a lot, but not stopped. Of course, the government didn't do anything else so that prolongation has been useless.

Most of the time of the quarantine, while we heard about cases in the media, most of us (except people living in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires) have not known anybody personally who had been infected so it all appear very unreal. Yet, you would ask people and scepticism wouldn't get to the point of denial of the virus, thankfully (of course, there have been exceptions). About two to three weeks ago, we reached the point in my town (Córdoba) when everybody knows somebody personally who's infected or has been. It does look like the peak. Problem is, this has been so long that, precisely now that we need people staying at home, they are no longer willing to. Even province governments have felt forced to relax the measures to provent more shops going backrupt.

The good thing about this is that the peak is the fastest point and there already are signs of things starting to move back to normal. Hospitals in my town are almost full, but not overcrowded anymore. There's a lot of talking about the vaccine, but let's get real: we can't make that happen any faster and if we can, it's not safe. The summer is approaching and people are wanting to go on anything that feels slightly like vacation. I don't think anyone or anything will be able to stop them.

[CTG]

Are you an egoist world class football player? Are you infected with COVID-19?

Plan A: act like Ibrahimovic, with humour and responsibility: https://www.goal.com/en/news/you-are-not-zlatan-ibrahimovic-urges-others-to-not-challenge/8s7ds47xqdrt1ojw9vnjzg33g

Plan B: act like gaynaldo - the rest of world is just your muppet show: https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/cristiano-ronaldo-says-that-the-pcr-test-%E2%80%9Cis-bull-%E2%80%9D/56411

Zlatan is legend, probably the best classic striker ever (with a 6th sense to score from ANYWHERE). cr7 is just metrosexual penalty scorer and world no. 2 (or rather 3), behind the ARG midget and Zlatan.

[CTG]

Vaccinated...

[dreadnaut]

Vaccinated...

Yay! Towards a summer of less worry and fear!

[Cas]

There's a mess here with the matter of vaccination. Very few vaccines and it seems only people who are direct friends of the government are getting vaccinated. Even worse, the people handling the vaccines are not really trustworthy, so we can't tell if we're being given a placebo or a vaccine that's lost its refrigeration at some point because it's clear that we'd be given it anyway and not told. So we just have to be hopeful.

Anyway, I estimate that by the end of this year, there will be so many vaccines in the world of every one of the laboratories that we won't know where to store them!  They will be as common or more than flu vaccines. Same thing that happened with masks. Remember when they used to be so expensive and difficult to find?  Ha, ha.

[alanrotoi]

The second wave is already here. No strict lockdowns so expect more cases/deaths. BTW all the labs such AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, Sputnik V (the Russian one) and others delayed their delivery of the vaccines so there are less than the expected for April. Anyway there are more than 7 million of vaccines (those we already have plus those who are on the way). It's a good number but I think we need a bit more millions at least.

I think I won't have the vaccine this year but my parents and my wife (she's a teacher) will be.

[Akoss Poo a.k.a. Zorromeister]

I also got the first dose of my vaccine on Sunday (Sputnik V). After some mild side effects, I'm okay now.

Here we experience the third wave where around 8000 people are found to be infected and 250 people die per day on average (in a ~10 million country)... Hungary is severely hit in this wave.

[CTG]

I also got the first dose of my vaccine on Sunday (Sputnik V). After some mild side effects, I'm okay now.

Here we experience the third wave where around 8000 people are found to be infected and 250 people die per day on average (in a ~10 million country)... Hungary is severely hit in this wave.

The normal death rate in Hungary was ~300-400 people/day before COVID-19. We have no weekly statistics about the third wave so far, but at the peak of the second wave in late November / early December 2020 it was 550-600 people/day. The current one will be even more serious...

The above numbers can be a bit misleading: a regular influenza wave can also increase this number to ~500/day.