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Coronavirus

Coronavirus - The Poll

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Alsty said:
Yep here too. Did my usual Friday shop tonight and it was like at Christmas. There was no toilet paper or soap.

People really are idiots. Calm the hell down. There's enough for everybody as long as you're not a selfish bar steward.
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This is because there's been some rumour flying around that the toilet roll production lines have been shutdown to make face masks, plus a friend who lives in Japan told me the Jap equivalent of 4chan started a rumour over there that all their toilet roll was manufactured in China etc. and everybody went out and cleared there shelves the too.

1) that's not how production works.
2) the lines making face masks do not make toilet rolls and are not interchangeable.
3) toilet rolls are not made in China lol.

Some stuffs manufacturing has been screwed up by this, but it's mainly electronic stuff, not toilet rolls.
 
D4n said:
Omg Gary with the "the sad part of this is the lack of compassion" argument.

You're a Tory voter ffs. You reep what you sow.
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I think you get your facts straight I actually voted lib Dem during the last election. So stick that where the sun don't shine.
 
In previous retail panics in difficult times, three day week and previous viral medical panics come to mind, the shortages were...
Toilet rolls.
Sugar.
Fray Bentos steak pies in a flat tin.
Bread.
Candles.
Petrol...very close to being rationed in the early seventies, my mumkept her petrol ration book for years.

We had a seperate cupboard for each item, each cupboard was filled to the top.
Some people even stored petrol inside their homes...it might get nicked in the shed!
There was no real shortage, just complete sheep following each other round the stores.
The steak pies and toilet rolls lasted for about five years.
Forty years later, we still have some of the candles.
And some of the bog roll was Izal.
Never ran out of tracing paper for school!
 
This may have been said before but I was in town yesterday and Boots, Superdrug and Tesco have limited hand sanitizer to two bottles per customer. The mass hysteria surrounding buying hand sanitizer etc is quite worrying, and I'll admit it put me in a panic.
 
This post is perfect:



Whether coronavirus turns into a pandemic or not, the ongoing panic buying frenzy is evidence that we've become a very sick society indeed.

After four decades of domination by a political establishment obsessed with hard-right neoliberal cult of the self, 'greed is a virtue' dogma we've become so normalised to individualism and consumerism that huge numbers of people have become absolutely incapable of even seeing the bigger picture.

Of course it's fine buying a bit of extra soap and hand gel if you're planning to follow the medical advice and keep your hands clean. That's sensible stuff, and the resulting rise in demand if we all behaved like this could be managed.

But those of you sitting at home with a stockpile of litres of hand soap and alcohol hand gel, all the medicines and cleaning products you could get your hands on, and hundreds of toilet rolls, you're actively making the problem worse, because in order to slow/stop the spread of the virus we all need to wash our hands and maintain our hygiene, and you're selfishly hogging the supply, and denying other people the means of doing so.

Essentially what you're proving is the fact that you think you can individualistically consume your way out of a problem that quite evidently requires a planned collaborative approach.

The capitalistic mindset tells people that the more money they spend, and the more stuff they hoard, the safer they'll be, even when it should be staggeringly obvious that this kind of myopic self-interest is ridiculously counter-productive, and that what's actually needed is responsibility and a collaborative approach.

And as is so often the case with capitalism, the people who will end up paying the highest price for this short-sighted greed of the minority are the most vulnerable people in society (in this case the elderly and the immunocompromised).
 
Would like to agree, but what I posted earlier...all in the peace, love and understanding sixties and seventies.
We were into self preservation and greed back then as well sadly, this isn't new.
 
:(
I can’t cope now. 6 months !
:(
Millions infected!
:(
RpW5Alq_d.jpg
 
I read somewhere else that the expected peak is in April/May and it should go downhill again towards the summer.

Even if it does return in the winter, there should be a vaccine for it by 2021.
 
On another note, this thread seems to have replaced the Brexit Thread as the thread that always seems to have been bumped every time I log on to the forums; quite coincidentally, the last post in the Brexit Thread was on 12th February and this thread was started on 14th February, so it's almost a perfectly timed replacement, as well!
 
I just found this really good article on The Guardian, about 9 reasons to be less worried about coronavirus:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...s-to-be-reassured/ar-BB10RvyV?ocid=spartanntp
If you don't want to read it, here's what it says:
The Guardian said:
  • We know what it is. As López-Goñi wrote for the Conversation France, the virus causing cases of severe pneumonia in Wuhan was identified within seven days of the official announcement on 31 December, and, three days after that, the gene sequence was available. The Aids virus, by contrast, took two years to identify after it first appeared in mid-1981, López-Goni noted. We also know the virus is natural, that it is related to a virus found in bats, and that it can mutate, but does not appear to do so very often.

  • We can test for it. By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin’s Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.

  • We know it can be contained (albeit at considerable cost). China’s draconian quarantine and containment measures appear to be working. On Thursday 120 new cases were reported in Wuhan, the lowest figure for six weeks, and, for the first time since the start of the outbreak, none at all in the rest of Hubei province. Several Chinese provinces have had no new cases for a fortnight and more are reopening their schools. In many countries, infections are in defined clusters, which should allow them to be more readily contained.

  • Catching it is not that easy (if we are careful) and we can kill it quite easily (provided we try). Frequent, careful hand washing, as we now all know, is the most effective way to stop the virus being transmitted, while a solution of ethanol, hydrogen peroxide and bleach will disinfect surfaces. To be considered at high risk of catching the coronavirus you need to live with, or have direct physical contact with, someone infected, be coughed or sneezed on by them (or pick up a used tissue), or be in face-to-face contact, within two metres, for more than 15 minutes. We’re not talking about passing someone in the street.
    • In most cases, symptoms are mild, and young people are at very low risk. According to a study of 45,000 confirmed infections in China, 81% of cases caused only minor illness, 14% of patients had symptoms described as “severe”, and just 5% were considered “critical”, with about half of those resulting in death. Only 3% of cases concern people under 20, children seem barely affected by the virus at all, and the mortality rate for the under-40s is about 0.2%. The rate rises in the over-65s, reaching nearly 15% in the over-80s, especially those with pre-existing heart or lung conditions. Calculating mortality rates during an ongoing epidemic is hard because it is not clear how many mild or asymptomatic cases have been tested for, but the best estimate we have for the coronavirus so far is 1.4% – somewhere between 1918 Spanish flu and 2009 swine flu.

    • People are recovering from it. As the daily count maintained by the John Hopkins CSSE shows, thousands of people around the world are making confirmed recoveries from the coronavirus every day.
    • Hundreds of scientific articles have already been written about it. Type Covid-19 or Sars-19 into the search engine of the US national library of medicine’s PubMed website and you will find, barely five weeks after the emergence of the virus, 539 references to papers about it, dealing with vaccines, therapies, epidemiology, diagnosis and clinical practice. That’s an exponentially faster publication rate than during the Sars epidemic, López-Goñi notes – and most publications’ coronavirus articles are free to access.

    • Vaccine prototypes exist. Commercial pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs such as Moderna, Inovio, Sanofi and Novavax, as well as academic groups such as one at the University of Queensland in Australia – many of which were already working on vaccines for similar Sars-related viruses – have preventive vaccine prototypes in development, some of which will soon be ready for human testing (although their efficacy and safety will of course take time to establish).

    • Dozens of treatments are already being tested. By mid-February, more than 80 clinical trials were under way for antiviral treatments, according to Nature magazine, and most have already been used successfully in treating other illnesses. Drugs such as remdesivir (Ebola, Sars), chloroquine (malaria), lopinavir and ritonavir (HIV), and baricitinib (rheumatoid polyarthritis) are all being trialled on patients who have contracted the coronavirus, some as a result of the application of artificial intelligence.
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I'm not saying that there's any less reason to be careful, but I hope it reassures some of you.
 
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