Topic: Coronavirus outbreak

Nah, they still have to remove it from all those phones and tablets.

Do I think caution about COVID-19 is warranted, and that people, particularly those with compromised immune systems and/or who are significantly advanced in age, should take precautions they're comfortable with? Yes.

Do I think the news, social media, and the internet in general are blowing the virus out of proportion and feeding panic? Yes.

Do I think hoarding and stocking up on basic supplies, unless your city or area is under lockdown, is an overreaction? Yes, but more power to those who feel the need to do so, I suppose.

Is avoiding/shunning someone solely based on their genetic features and what they're wearing advisable? Definitely not, this is just ridiculous. Illness doesn't discriminate. The only people to be wary of are those who have knowingly, WITH PROOF, been exposed and who should be in quarantine.

The usual precautions with any transferrable illness should applied here; I'm not sure much else is warranted in many cases. Wash your hands often, limit public exposure, try not to touch your face, ears, and so on before cleaning your hands, etc. And if you have been exposed or are ill, stay away from those with weaker immune systems and, heck, don't even leave your home.

(On a lighter note, that last paragraph is perfect for introverts like yours truly.)

@Woomy_NNYes We call them 'shopping trolleys', and while technically we might say 'grocery shop', most of us buy our groceries at 'supermarkets'.

A broken clock is right twice a day 😜

I'd suspect many things and many governments of intentionally producing synthetic diseases, but if that were the case, this thing would be a lot more efficient and controllable than it actually is. From what I've read, the likely cause here was transfer from animals to humans, similar to SARS (which is the same type of organism.) The suspected point of origin was one of the "wet markets" in Wuhan that sells.....questionable....meats/seafood. Nothing is confirmed for sure yet. And probably never will be for many reasons.

What I don't understand is why it takes them so long when there's signs of some highly infections disease to ban travel. China should have been on 100% lockdown to everything not essential/medical/etc. in and out in December. Ok, China is China and their responses are politics first. Japan & Korea probably should have banned most travel as well by January. The US & Europe should have self imposed a block on all inbound travel from all affected areas day 1. "Starve a cold" - "Starve a pandemic" - don't give it as much open entry as possible to infect as many areas as possible. Even worse than the internet and smartphones air travel really is nightmare that broke Earth. If instead of a virus the headline were "zombies run amock in China and could spread anywhere disguised as normal humans!" would the response have been "lets just keep all the flights coming in as normal and hope for the best!" No, people would have stopped all incoming flights until the zombie thing got sorted out. There's weird cavalier attitude toward disease where they whip up media hysteria and keep everyone on edge, while also keeping the door wide open for the threat to actually enter as though inviting it as rapidly as possible. I don't think common sense caught up to the arrival of the aviation age.

If this were Black Death, humans would have been extinct by February.

Meanwhile we have this absurd economically interdependent system where the domino effect topples everything from manufacture to transport of half the goods of the world. We built quite a mess with our haste for maximum efficiency without worrying about what happens if anything interrupts a perfect daily routine.

it doesn't really matter if the thing becomes a plague or not. The damage to the entire fragile house of cards of the modern world they've built is already being done, and demonstrates how fragile that system actually is to disruption.

On the bright side, some of us were anticipating a long awaited plague, right @Ryu_Niiyama?

Where’s the direct

Edit wrong thread.

@La-weejee Don't worry. After election day you won't hear more than a handful of footnotes of Corona happening "somewhere else." Always need a crisis in an election cycle!

Either that or it really is the plague and we'll be living a Playstation demo reel IRL by then.

@NEStalgia When the governments and health experts everywhere tell you that the best prevention method is basic hygiene and manners...it’s time.

Clearly, we have reached the point where we have collectively forgotten how to wipe our own behind lol.

@HobbitGamer So much truth.

@NEStalgia @HobbitGamer thou speak truth.

I’ve noticed there’s no visible shortage in my woods on actual soap. So I’ll be one of the few clean people in Georgia washing my hands and eating all the plentiful peanut butter, while neighbors have wars over tp.

I really don't get the TP thing. Why are people hoarding TP? It's not even related to the disease. Tissues maybe. But TP? I don't know how that became a thing. It feels like a Facebook phenomenon. It probably is a Facebook phenomenon.

@NEStalgia from what I heard it went like...

P1: “But what if the problems in China cause a shortage of things like toilet paper?!”
P2: “Oh god it’s true let’s buy as much as we can!”

P3: “We don’t depend on China for our supply of toilet paper...?”
P1: “But now there’s an actual shortage because people are buying it all! Buy it while you can!”

P1’s identity? Big Toilet Paper <dramatic music>.

This is why you use bidet instead of having to rely on TP :V

People are hoarding water too. It's insane; the media has terrified almost everyone with this virus.

Seeing how this is crippling countries like Italy and China (and pushing local medical systems to their limits), and knowing that other countries will likely get worse in the coming weeks, some level of fear is warranted.

With that said, it's unlikely that people need supplies to carry them for months or years. Even in the worst hit areas, people aren't living in bomb shelters.

@Eel Haha...so true. Then again, BigT messed up their plan if they didn't actually stockpile product to sell in the panic. Maybe it was big logging? They knew BigT would pay any price for more wood.

@darkfenrir It's all fun and games until the rumor mill starts that the disease is waterborne and you're shooting it up the rear....

@MsJubilee Seriously? Do people even know what they're protecting against at this point? They'd do better to NOT go to the grocery store and buy water than to have a 20 year supply of water. They're not preparing for an earthquake for crying out loud (Unless you're in California in which case you should have already had your 20 year supply for your earthquake shelter....)

Maybe it's good the media terrified people though. People are morons. They'd keep licking escalator handrails and eating off drug store floors repeating "there's no big deal, nobody's going to get that China thing" if they weren't slapped into sheer terror of inhaling.

@Raliza Italy is probably more quickly crippled by such things both due to quarters and customs that practically promote the spread of infections disease (how is the Western origin of the Black Death so lax with such things a millennium later?!) and no real systematic way of adapting away form that - it's a part of life. Plus it's always been the entry point to Europe for Asia for the most part, so they certainly had more early exposure than most places before there was much caution applied. Of course once it got there it quickly got everywhere. China is the origin and they bumbled any response horrifically by burring the problem at the local level. Yet again. (Technically China's central government, if there's one thing they're really good at it's something like this - locking down everything and crushing the problem by any means necessary and a few not necessary for good measure and making examples. Their failure is it never gets to the central government because the regional governments have every incentive by the central government to suppress ALL problems and make them "disappear" even if just by pretending they don't exist.) In this case, down to imprisoning the doctor that tried to call attention to it until he submitted to recanting that he was wrong and there's no outbreak. Done. Problem solved. Nothing to report to central!

The rest of the world has a little bit of a leg up on it only due to being more cautious around the earlier cases. Maybe. The problem now is so MANY people have it, without locking down the world, containing it doesn't seem remotely possible. People love the politics of finger pointing and stopping travel from Europe.....that's madness....the problem isn't that it's being done. The problem is it's being done at least 8 weeks too late. And that Europe didn't do the same for Asia weeks before that. People need to learn to start offending people common sense protective measures. "Better late than never" doesn't really work for infectious disease. As long as they keep travel flowing through the early periods of any outbreak of something, it's clear they don't really take disease seriously. They only deal with it once it's already a crisis and then it's beyond their ability to really contain. They got lucky with previous contagions....none of those were particularly infectious. This one is, and their policy of "don't interrupt anything and hope it solves itself with minimal interaction" doesn't work. Thankfully this one is a wakeup call that while it sucks, demonstrates their total incompetence at managing actual virulent disease while not being one of the really really nasty diseases for everyone to have to learn the emperor has no clothes the catastrophic way.

Then again, Europe went through Black Death almost a millennium ago and still hasn't learned much from it, apparently.

Care to elaborate?

And your ancestors lived in Europe as well, yet NA isn't doing any better

@NEStalgia the plot thickens.

Perhaps it was Big Bidet trying to attack the toilet paper industry.