Zompist Bboard Again

No trick-or-treaters here this year. I wouldn't have answered the door anyway, but no one even tried to ring.

Ah yeah. There was a lot of hand-wringing about Halloween on the local parents' Whatsapp group.

(Yeah, we have a local parent's Whatsapp Group. It's about as bad as you'd expect)

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Oct 31, 2020 7:04 pm Ah yeah. There was a lot of hand-wringing about Halloween on the local parents' Whatsapp group.

(Yeah, we have a local parent's Whatsapp Group. It's about as bad as you'd expect)

Halloween isn't even a French thing, from what I recall, so the fact that your local parents' Whatsapp group was hand-wringing about it...

(I should note that I've learned to hate anything with the word "parent" in its name, even though I'm a parent myself.)

No, it's a thing here too now, I guess. Not a very big deal compared to the US, but the kids like it anyway.

(As a rule, of course, people on that Whatsapp group will fret over the silliest things.)

In the absence of any other plans, my flatmate and I ended up driving around last night to look at Halloween directions. We ended up driving through both Wrigleyville, one of the major nightlife areas, and Northalsted (formerly Boystown), the heart of the traditional gaybourhood. Northalsted was pretty quiet; there was some activity at larger establishments with outdoor seating (indoor drinking and dining is banned again in Chicago) but others were shuttered entirely. Not so Wrigelyville! Lots of people on the street and standing too close in long lines to get into venues, which seemed to be getting around the 25-person limit by having huge tents which don't technically count as "indoor spaces". (Or maybe they just bribed the city, who even knows?) As we drove back I was thinking, "Well, at least when this thing explodes again you can't say it was the homos' fault."

I was looking at the new quarantine rules for people coming from out of state (or even momentarily leaving and then returning) in New York just announced by Cuomo and wondering just how can they be constitutional.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Oct 31, 2020 7:19 pm (I should note that I've learned to hate anything with the word "parent" in its name, even though I'm a parent myself.)

I wonder if that should have been "because I'm a parent myself".

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 11:14 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Oct 31, 2020 7:19 pm (I should note that I've learned to hate anything with the word "parent" in its name, even though I'm a parent myself.)

I wonder if that should have been "because I'm a parent myself".

Nah, I had the same opinion, that any organization with "parent" or "family", unless it is family planning-related, in its name is likely to be a bunch of right-wing [expletive deleted]s, before I became a parent.

I wonder if the fact that more than half of the posts in this thread so far were made within less than a month after the original post is telling us something.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Nov 03, 2020 1:57 pm I wonder if the fact that more than half of the posts in this thread so far were made within less than a month after the original post is telling us something.

It tells us the people that haven't posted lately are dead.

Or it just tells us that the virus isn't new at this point.

Vardelm wrote: ↑Tue Nov 03, 2020 4:29 pm
Or it just tells us that the virus isn't new at this point.

Yeah, I guess that's it.

People in the board just aren't as interested in sharing or discussing stuff about the virus, it seems. In another forum I'm in, which is more or less as slow as this one if not slightly slower, the COVID thread is at 91 pages right now. That said, I checked the first post of every tenth page, and the distribution was:

1: Feb 25
10: Mar 14
20: Mar 18
30: Mar 22
40: Apr 1
50: Apr 27
60: June 17
70: July 21
80: Sep 26
90: Sep 29
91: yesterday

...which still shows a slow-down in April and a more significant one the next few months.

And a picking back up in September it seems...

I've now had reports that a variety of Covid-19 that had spread on mink farms in Denmark has mutated and has now been transferred back to human beings. That doesn't sound good to me at all.

According to this: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/sta ... 1449304067, there's not much risk. The mutations may make the virus more contagious for minks, but not for humans. Given the number of cases in humans, if a simple mutation could make the virus more contagious to humans, it would have already happened.

I just learned the local cheese shop does home delivery. I think we reached peak France.

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:20 pm According to this: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/sta ... 1449304067, there's not much risk. The mutations may make the virus more contagious for minks, but not for humans. Given the number of cases in humans, if a simple mutation could make the virus more contagious to humans, it would have already happened.

Ah, thank you.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 3:37 am

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:20 pm According to this: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/sta ... 1449304067, there's not much risk. The mutations may make the virus more contagious for minks, but not for humans. Given the number of cases in humans, if a simple mutation could make the virus more contagious to humans, it would have already happened.

Ah, thank you.

The problem with this mutated virus is that it seems to be resistant to antibodies against the normal virus, and therefore many of the vaccines that are currently being developed might not work against the mutated variant. Because of this, Denmark is trying to eliminate the new virus by killing all the minks and isolating the region for a couple of weeks.

Oh. Thank you! That's not good at all.

We've had, in the US, a bit over 250,000 deaths from COVID-19. It's popular in certain circles to blame all of them on Trump, e.g. "Trump has killed over 200,000 Americans!" or whatever, and equally popular in certain other circles to declare that all of them were inevitable and not Trump's fault in the slightest. But it's pretty obvious neither of these are fully true. Regardless of who was president, there would have been some deaths anyway, especially given what we know now about how long it can take to develop symptoms, the number of asymptomatic people, etc., but it's also clear that a stronger response early on could've greatly reduced the spread.

So what I'm curious is, have any reputable sources/researchers done analyses of how things could've gone differently if the US/Trump had taken it more seriously from the beginning? No cheating by using information we didn't have at the time, either--but if we rolled back to, say, February 1, a couple weeks after the first case popped up in the US, and made different choices, what sort of outcomes might we expect? Or to put it more bluntly, how many of those quarter-million deaths really were "inevitable", and how many were a result of Trump's dreadful mishandling of the situation?

It's a pretty big, nebulous question, because there's so many factors--what "different choices" would you make? How accurately can we predict how people would respond to these different choices? Assuming the only difference is the choices/direction of the president, how much would the choices of state governments change? [that is, we're not directly meddling with state-level response here, we're only meddling with the president's choices and letting everything else flow from there] And it's hard to make these kinds of predictions when we aren't out of the weeds yet. But it's something I've been musing over lately.

(I'm guessing the answer is going to be, no, nobody's done this kind of large-scale analysis, but maybe there's been some studies on individual factors like encouraging mask-wearing right away, buying/increasing production of medical equipment sooner, going into lockdown earlier, etc.)