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placnx
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Posts posted by placnx
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4 hours ago, Chiang Mai Bill said:
Hmmmm. So the USA, UK, EU, Iceland, Israel and others will have their certification. I wonder if there will be any compatability --- or comparability -- with each? Will they all be in the language of their origin? Will, say in the case of Thailand, there be an infrastructure to detect forgeries and the Immigration officers have a knowledge of the different languages? I doubt that the French will want their certificates be in English!
In the first week of the UK demanding covid tests on all arrivals numerous forgeries were detected!
No doubt they will be available on the internet for $50.
This is why the card has to be linked to a database that cannot be forged. Compatibility at the moment looks to be an issue. There are several incompatible digital efforts out there, not to mention all the national projects:
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6 hours ago, jomtienisgood said:
Not correct, as they apply the Sicker from each separate vaccine onto it.... 1 vaccine = 1 label....
These stickers could be put on a physical QR vaccination card, but that's mainly for local use in remote areas of the Third World. Mostly the individual would have their data recorded to a national database when vaccinated, except if jabbed beyond reach of phone service. In that case, the data could be collected from their card when they visit a clinic. Pet vaccination certificates in Thailand use vaccine stickers.
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7 hours ago, billd766 said:
For expats would that mean returning to your home country, and then spending an enormous amount of time and money trying to return to Thailand?
No, the country where you get vaccinated could issue the sticker to put in your passport.
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10 hours ago, 4MyEgo said:
There's also not a lot being said that those who have had Coronaviruses before, flu/cold become asymptomatic and therefore end up with basically nothing, surely they would add to the herd immunity when they shake it off, albeit they also can spread it.
People who have had Covid are still advised to get vaccinated.
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10 hours ago, Sydebolle said:
How about a stamp into the traveller‘s passport by the passport issuing agency instead? One booklet less and definitely more secure than those booklets - specially in a country of c(o)unterfeits like .....
It could be a sticker with QR code to reference the traveler's digital vaccination record.
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10 hours ago, FarFlungFalang said:
The theory is that we need only achieve 70% for herd immunity to kick in and finish the virus off which is fine if the virus stops its mutation tricks.
After the UK variant now they are saying that 80% is needed to achieve herd immunity. It also depends on the efficacy of the vaccine.
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22 hours ago, GeorgeCross said:22 hours ago, snoop1130 said:
Thai health officials are not convinced about the “vaccine passport” idea, which would allow travellers, who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 to enter Thailand without the need to endure 14-days of quarantine.
Any vaccine passport should not override the discretion of public health officials at the entry point. Of course, it would make sense that the airline clears a person when they are getting a ticket, to let them know whether they will probably be able to enter x-country without quarantine, etc., or even be refused entry.
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10 hours ago, ukrules said:
Any 'vaccine passport' would need to be very specific, apparently only some vaccines work for some of the variants and others, not so much.
It's going to be a complex and rapidly changing situation.
Conclusion - it's completely unworkable.
If it was as simple as showing you've been vaccinated then no problem but that's not the case at all.
It's going to be complex. I looked at the Estonia/WHO project today. Estonia is creating a digitized administrative environment, and a local private company is developing that for their government, so this WHO card project piggybacks on what they are already doing. Here are some links:
https://guardtime.com/vaccineguard
https://m.guardtime.com/files/Guardtime_VaccineGuard_Whitepaper_v2.pdf
It seems that they have developed their own data exchange standards, which in not helpful. Further, they do the same as other, such as the IATA initiative, by using a app on a smartphone to generate a QR "good-to-go" code. These QR codes are time-sensitive authorization codes.
I do not like all this fragmentation. Here you can see how bad it is:
There would probably be a lot of people in the Third World with phones that could not deal with these apps. Though they are not the people likely to take international flights, their health is important for controlling Covid.
The opposite approach would make it possible for people all over the world to use the same basic certificate, but each certificate would have a pre-printed individualized QR code that would be entered in the national database of the country where the first vaccination was administered. This code would never change for the individual concerned, could be used for all subsequent vaccinations, for other diseases as well.
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6 hours ago, pseudorabies said:
It's based on the idea that a chronic infection that gives maximum opportunity to spread (reproduce) is in the virus's best interest and that killing the host is not.
Actually, Covid doesn't kill that many of the people who are infected. It has a long way to go before the mortality rate rose so much that it would cause the virus to be selected for less harm or to simply disappear.
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15 hours ago, cdemundo said:
Is this true? I have never heard this. I would think that a harmless variant would quickly disappear and the more harmful (or at least more infectious) would continue to spread. What is your source of this statement?
This may be true for some viruses. The relative infectiousness of a variant would seem to be the determinant.
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23 hours ago, GroveHillWanderer said:
Dont forget, what they're doing is taking a vaccine with a genetic sequence of 38,000 characters at its core and replacing just a handful of those characters (17 in the case of the SA variant, IIRC). The outer part of the vaccine (the lipid membrane) for instance, will be totally unaltered.
You're mixing up the vaccine with the genetic sequence of the virus. The vaccine only contains snippets of the viral sequence.
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23 hours ago, EricTh said:
Modifying any vaccine means they have to start all the phases of clinical trials again which may take another one year.
It's not like Windows update when you can just download without any human trials. What may work in the past may not work now and vice versa.
Actually the public health people in the US have already said that verifying updates to vaccines will only take weeks. This refers to mRNA vaccines, at least. It's another matter for traditional vaccines such as the Chinese ones.
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23 hours ago, GroveHillWanderer said:
It's actually pretty much the opposite of what you said. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine still provides good efficacy against all the variants other than the South African one and even for the SA variant where its efficacy is lower it still provides protection against severe illness, hospitalisation or death. It's only against mild cases that it is not so effective.
See report below where it is stated, in relation to the AstraZeneca vaccine (and others):
"What that is looking like is that we may not be reducing the total number of cases but there's still protection in that case against deaths, hospitalisations and severe disease."
Oxford-AstraZeneca said that they're working on an update. So will Thailand get to produce the updated version of their vaccine. It should be feasible.
Reducing hospitalisations is a worthy outcome, but it's really important to stop the transmission, since the more the spread, the more dangerous variants might emerge. Then we might be back to square one.
Hopefully the US and others will arrive at the conclusion that they have to greatly expand production capacity for vaccines such as mRNA types that can more rapidly be adapted to new variants so that people can be vaccinated or boosted proactively. For the US, 300mn booster doses available in a month or so would be a game changer. This productive capacity would then be available for the Third World in particular.
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1 minute ago, bangon04 said:
Even if each country sets its own standards.... if you want to play the game you will have to follow the rules.....
Each country can decide who can enter, but I hope that their informatics on vaccinations can interface. Otherwise it will be chaos at the airports.
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1 hour ago, heybruce said:
With the exception of "Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019" I didn't see any related to copyrights. I don't think that one act had much of an effect on Microsoft's bottom line.
I think the disparity of wealth has numerous causes. In some cases it is government policies benefiting certain industries. However I don't think computer operating systems are one of those industries. People want a standard OS that they are familiar with and can use on any computer (Windows) or mobile device (Android). Microsoft and Google won in the competition to build and market such operating systems.
Software is a good business. There is usually a big profit margin after development costs are paid off. The open concept of MS-DOS or Android is good for society and lucrative for the authors.
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5 hours ago, John Drake said:
Why would any country accept the AZ vaccine for clearance, as it clearly doesn't work on the latest mutated form of Covid?
They are already working on a revision to take account of the South African variant. I agree that the idea of a lot of people getting a little sick doesn't sound good. More infections means more chance for more variants.
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3 hours ago, tonbridgebrit said:
Well, let's put it this way. Roughly three hundred thousand have already got a BNO. Another two or three million are in the following position; they will likely get a BNO if they apply. Anybody applying and getting a BNO now, will have the same BNO as the existing three hundred thousand.
There's six to seven million people in Hong Kong. Surely, one or two million of them did actually take part in the peaceful demonstrations. The vast majority of the six to seven million in Hong Kong are free to leave Hong Kong and turn up at whatever country that will accept them. Accept them as tourists or whatever. It's only a tiny minority who took part in the riots who are being 'hunted and chased' by the Hong Kong government. Yes, these people might have a problem when exiting Hong Kong.
Okay, during the last three decades, and it will be the same in the next few coming years, why is it that we simply have not seen a mass re-location of Chinese in Hong Kong to foreign countries ? Yes, some have left. But lots of those who left Hong Kong have gone back to Hong Kong. Those people in Hong Kong prior to the 1997 Handover, the vast majority have continued to stay in Hong Kong. And those who qualify to enter Britain, Canada, etc, (because they've got money and/or special skills) well, the majority of them have stayed in Hong Kong. Or returned to Hong Kong after a few years abroad.
Why is that ? I say with a smirk on my face, it's because they want to. Restrictions on religion. Restrictions on free speech. Restrictions on the media. And the latest is propaganda and indoctrination in schools. It's being greatly exaggerated by the media in America and Europe. For the vast majority of people in Hong Kong, they'd rather stay than leave. ????Some people went abroad after 1997 to set up elsewhere as an insurance policy, as it were, then moved back to their HK home once they had acquired alternate status.
According to this link, 469,000 have active BNO passports among the 2.9 million entitled to BNO passports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_(Overseas)
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1 hour ago, cmarshall said:
Microsoft's cash reserves on had on Dec. 31, 2020 were $131.968 billion. That number alone demonstrates Microsoft's utter failure to innovate since if a company cannot find an investment for its cash, it should return the cash to the shareholders.
Hands-free keyboard certainly sounds like a thrilling breakthrough that will signal a new era of technology. How about MS contribution to the serious technical challenges facing the world such as clean energy, high-speed rail, a new generation of computer and communications security, etc. MS is not on the map of global innovation.
But that's the nature of a rent-seeking organization. They are happy to sit and collect their skim from consumers and businesses without developing anything new. Think of Saudi sheiks happily enjoying their tea breaks in Redmond.
All the big tech companies have piles of cash, so does Berkshire-Hathaway - Buffett's company. Nothing special about MSFT. These days it's hard to find value in buying tech companies, so if they have cash, better wait for cheaper prices.
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18 hours ago, tonbridgebrit said:
So, about three hundred thousand Chinese in Hong Kong have got this BNO passport. Supposedly, another two million in Hong Kong can still apply and get a BNO. You're correct, the issue of being born in Hong Kong prior to 1997 has a massive bearing on who in Hong Kong can get a BNO. Okay, a child can still get a BNO if the parents have a BNO.
Now, of the 300,000 in Hong Kong who have the BNO, how many will actually move to Britain ? I don't think the numbers moving to Britain and staying for the long-term, will be great. I think, only a tiny minority of the three hundred thousand will actually come to live long-term in Britain. And the two or three million who can still apply and get a BNO, I really don't think there will be a rush to get the application form. ????
Why is that ? ????What I heard on BBC that 300,000 is the estimate of people who are likely to emigrate. Many more have or would be eligible to get a BNO passport. So how would they get out of HK on a BNO passport? Would they have to get out with an HKSAR passport, then use the BNO to enter Britain? People who had committed "crimes" such as demonstrating might not be able to leave, or even get an HK passport.
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18 hours ago, billd766 said:
The problem I can see here is that it will require a huge worldwide database in some country with all the other countries linked to it. This may lead to hacking, changing of data, stealing of data, entering fake data and in the worst case, hackers could leave computer viruses which could infect the databases of so many countries.
Somewhere back in these posts I explained that the vaccination records would be stored nationally, but the database for vaccines would most likely be unitary in the cloud. The Solar Wind hacking problems seen recently certainly are chilling, so a lot of attention would have to be placed on security. Auto updates to the vaccine database should be avoided.
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9 hours ago, cmarshall said:
However, if philanthropy were an adequate substitute for good public health policy, then the US Covid death toll wouldn't be about to reach half a million.
There is a video from around 2015 where Gates was warning about pandemic. Even he doesn't have enough cash to redirect public health in the US away from know-nothings at the top.
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13 hours ago, Credo said:
I don't know what people are thinking. Of course, they will do this just like every country does it. Anybody who went to a western school received the same type of indoctrination. Anybody who has taught at a Thai school knows that it is done every day.
Whether it is standing to sing the National Anthem, pledging allegiance to the flag, or praying to the country's God of choice, that's what education is all about. We teach children to honor the country, the flag and the religion (or some combination) and we teach them how to behave -- what rules we follow to get along, what is right and wrong and what is permissible.
I can assure you it doesn't take 12 years to teach children to simply read, write and do arithmetic.I believe that the US Supreme Court has decided that pledge of allegiance in school is optional. Praying is obviously optional.
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19 minutes ago, Morch said:
And how is it linked to that person? How are the details stored? Everything can (eventually) be hacked and faked.
The issue could be some country hacking the national databases of another country. Actually, they might be even more interested in hacking the vaccine database to downgrade a competitor. That might be a single database in the cloud, so a lot of attention to security would be needed.
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4 hours ago, scorecard said:
Agreed.
But to be honest I'm less then impressed with the World Health Organization on many aspects of the whole Covid 19 issue, and now it seems they have done very little to plan/implement a globally accepted Vaccine Certificate.
It's reported that Estonia is working on an updated certificate for WHO.
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Thai health officials skeptical about vaccine passports
in Thailand News
Posted
Testing will still be needed in some cases, such as antigen testing on airport check in with people coming from countries with dangerous mutations. It's complicated.