yuyiinthesky

I would have done the same as these brave people - stand your ground!

1 hour ago, BritManToo said:

I like Cambodia, but there's no VISA's to be had for there.

And I like Vietnam, no VISAs on sale for there either.

 

Nowhere I want to go is letting any foreigners in at the moment.

But I guess somethings got to change soon, or the natives will become restless, and governments will wobble. 

Not that Serbia is a country to go to, but it is an example for your point: there the government wanted to lockdown again, after alleging a second wave might come otherwise - and the people had enough of the <deleted>, spontaneously stormed the parliament and told the government that there is no more lockdown.

Quote

On Tuesday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić addressed the nation and announced the re-imposition of a nationwide lockdown, starting on Friday, July 10, and ending on Monday, July 13. As soon as the president concluded his remarks, a seemingly spontaneous protest began taking shape in downtown Belgrade. News of the protest spread through messages on social media, as people sought to voice disapproval of President Vučić’s decision to re-impose a nationwide lockdown.

So your concerns are very valid, the ones which suffer from this lockdown are indeed getting “restless”.

17 hours ago, ezzra said:

Until and when a vaccine will be found there are no other safe ways to contain the virus and stam the pandemic, if there was, every other country in the world would have done it already... so do what many others governments did, pay and support people and business to sit home... 

Hi Bill, stop preaching this nonsense. Scaremongering.  Despite opening up in many countries, all ok there. 

7 hours ago, MikeN said:

With this virus you can be infectious before you start showing symptoms, and even when you do realize you are sick, you do not drop dead immediately! There is plenty of time for the virus to spread and reproduce before a host dies. You are giving the virus too much credit.

If you’re dead, you spread nothing but bad smell. If all around you are dead, the smell gets even worse, and any virus they all might host, dies. Sooner or later there’s no-one around you to infect any more. Extreme social distancing. And the survival of the virus - a failure. So if the virus would have a will and choose a strategy to grow and survive, killing would not be a part of it.

3 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

 

But but but.... I demand my FREEDOM to go entirely mask-free, associate closely with others, never wash my hands, and, if I'm lucky, become famous as a super-spreader!!!!  Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame in this world... 

Sorry to disappoint you, If you’re in Thailand or neighboring countries, you will much more likely win the lottery than getting a chance to become a super-spreader. No SARS-CoV-2 here, really sorry.

May be spread something more useful for your 15 minutes of fame. Preaching the end of the world seems to be quite popular, how about trying that?

But please, wash your hands, please!

2 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

However, if one strain is much more infectious/contagious, as appears to be the case

This is pure speculation. What we see is more probably simply a ‘first come, first served’ effect.

15 hours ago, geriatrickid said:

Community Immunity (aka herd immunity) is a numbers game. predictions are reliable when the disease is  understood and we are only a short time into this  infection,

 

The issue has become politicized, so what better way to address some of the bias by  seeing what a conservative republican Governor of the US State of Mississippi has to say.

I disagree, better not to look at the bickering in election year USA, especially now with all the cancel culture and censorship going on there. There are lots of universities and experienced professors in the old world, and I haven’t found a single one of them yet who is a herd immunity denier. 

3 minutes ago, GroveHillWanderer said:

All the major vaccine development groups have committed to making any eventual vaccine that they might come up with, available on a non-profit basis. This is also a pre-requisite for any vaccine development effort receiving funding from either the Gates Foundation or the Global Vaccine Alliance - and a large proportion of the vaccine groups have accepted funding from these two organisations.

Easy to do, shift some billions from country A to country B, Bill’s Microsoft can teach them a lesson on how to reduce profits on paper (there to avoid paying taxes).

2 minutes ago, simple1 said:

if I recall correctly flu vaccine averages 60% effectiveness. As I'm diabetic at high risk I have an annual flu shot. As you know flu vaccine contributes to keeping known flu deaths at approx 500k p.a. worldwide, as opposed to millions without a vaccine.

If you had the impression that I want to take away your influenza vaccine, then calm down, I don’t.

Nevertheless I recall that last year’s vaccine had a quite low effectiveness, I think around 10%.

But by all means, that is not to say you should not get it, not at all.

8 minutes ago, simple1 said:

Guess what, the people developing Covid vaccine/s have more info than you and will take into consideration all the challenges.

I really hope so, it would be even more scary if they would release new gene altering vaccines having not more information available as I do.

8 minutes ago, simple1 said:

"The influenza vaccination tries to guess the coming mutations"

 

Tries to guess?

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5861780/

Yes, thanks for the link, explaining in more scientific terms exactly what I said. Here the abstract from your link:

Quote

Influenza vaccine composition is reviewed before every flu season because influenza viruses constantly evolve through antigenic changes. To inform vaccine updates, laboratories that contribute to the World Health Organization Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System monitor the antigenic phenotypes of circulating viruses all year round. Vaccine strains are selected in anticipation of the upcoming influenza season to allow adequate time for production. A mismatch between vaccine strains and predominant strains in the flu season can significantly reduce vaccine effectiveness. Models for predicting the evolution of influenza based on the relationship of genetic mutations and antigenic characteristics of circulating viruses may inform vaccine strain selection decisions. We review the literature on state-of-the-art tools and prediction methodologies utilized in modeling the evolution of influenza to inform vaccine strain selection. We then discuss areas that are open for improvement and need further research.

As they say, the predictions are sometimes quite good and sometimes not so good. Wasn’t it last season just about 10% effectiveness?

4 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

The coronaviruses do not produce herd immunity.

Really? Source?

9 hours ago, simple1 said:

There is no herd immunity from influenza. There is the annual 'flu' vaccine which worldwide annual deaths at approx 500k instead of millions.

Again a misleading statement. The influenza virus of this year is not coming back next season, but a changed version. The influenza virus is, very different to the common corona viruses, mutating heavily and thus presents itself to the immune system differently every season, it’s like being a different virus. The influenza vaccination tries to guess the coming mutations, based on the last one, with more ore less success each year.

4 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

The opinion of Dr. William Haseltine cited above is sobering with information that is new at least to me.  These are excerpts from his blog:

 

But we waste critical time with this pointless discussion, because the facts are already quite clear: herd immunity will likely never be achieved for Covid-19 or any other coronavirus. We know this thanks to new research on the development and decline of Covid antibodies and from a wealth of epidemiological evidence on coronaviruses as a whole.

While SARS and MERS are the coronaviruses that grab the headlines, there are four other mostly unknown coronaviruses that are much more common: 229E, HKU1, NL63 and OC43. What we know from 60 years of research into these viruses is that they come back year after year and reinfect the same people — over and over again.

 

Over the past weekend, researchers from the United Kingdom published new research which suggests that SARS-CoV-2 does indeed act like its more common cousins. They studied the presence of neutralizing antibodies — the specific antibodies needed to fight off reinfection — and found that a transient neutralizing antibody response was “a feature shared by both a SARS-CoV-2 infection that causes low disease severity and the circulating seasonal coronaviruses that are associated with common colds.”

 

T cells help our immune system by killing off infected cells and activating other immune cells to fight off the infection. We know people make robust and sometimes long-lasting T cell responses to cold causing coronaviruses. However important the T cell response may be in clearing infection, it is clear that it does not prevent reinfection, which occurs regularly with the more common coronaviruses.

 

https://www.williamhaseltine.com/were-wasting-time-talking-about-herd-immunity/

Even Germany’s most scaremongering virologist, Drosten, the guy who advises the German government, does not question herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2.

On 7/15/2020 at 2:55 PM, webfact said:

When the PM asked what scares people into not leaving home, the answer he got was “the press”, and in response to that he told reporters: “You should ease off on spreading news about recent cases. Tell people to shop as usual as the situation is not severe.”

 

Moreover, he said, Thailand had suffered the Covid-19 crisis before and effectively brought it to an end.

Finally he understands that scaremongering is something bad - at least as long as it does not work in his favor.

5 hours ago, cmarshall said:

Success is a death rate per million comparable to China 3.33, S. Korea 5.6, or Thailand 0.84. 

And more success than that is a death rate of zero, achieved by Cambodia with measures more similar to Sweden than to Thailand, no draconian lockdowns, no bans, no curfews. 

4 hours ago, cmarshall said:

Even if a virus does evolve to become non-lethal, that evolution may well take hundreds or thousands of years.  The Plague of Antoninus, which killed Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, may have been measles or chicken pox, which are now relatively harmless childhood diseases.  Bubonic plague recurred repeatedly in Europe from 1346 until 1720.  Although later outbreaks did not spread as widely as in the 14th century, the fatality rate remained high in affected areas.  

 

So, evolution is not likely to bail us out of the Covid pandemic.

To take up your argument, I think history has proven that no disease, no virus, is able to stop us. We conquered the globe, many billions of us now, everywhere, unstoppable. Our immune system and our intelligence has won every battle, even with the most ferocious attackers.

With SARS-CoV-2 now gone already in many countries, it’s quite obvious that evolution and history is on our side, we’ll survive, unless we commit global suicide, shut us down, becoming too scared to live.

19 minutes ago, kenk24 said:

yes of course.. I have another friend who thinks nobody is dead or has died from covid... I guess it depends on where you get your news... 

 

but don't take it from me... maybe watch some of the hospital workers talking abt not having enuf beds or respirators or places to put the bodies... 

Please explain how a virus can spread if his hosts, which it needs to reproduce, die?

Everytime a host dies, it becomes unavailable for the virus to reproduce it. If survival and reproduction is the target, then this is a failure.

You may want to read up a little on Darwin and evolution, instead of scaremongering journalism.

Or are you one of these people which claim the virus has its own conscience, its free will and that will is to kill us?

3 hours ago, simple1 said:

If developed in a secure and professional environment such as Australia, which has a great reputation for medical research - Yes. No idea how long for production in sufficient quantities. I do understand there are legal licensing mechanisms to distribute production to facilities worldwide; whether a developer of the IP would go down this path is the question. If already contracted to the US in the same manner as the Israeli developer, Gilead, then the answer would be 'no way' for sufficient supply.

Feel free to volunteer as Guinea pig for a fast tracked new experimental gene altering vaccine. I won’t.

9 hours ago, kenk24 said:

my sad and unprofessional thought on that, is that the more the virus spreads, the more chance it has to mutate and become more sophisticated at killing us... 

 

maybe, this time, the virus wins... 

utter nonsense, scaremongering!

A virus which kills - dies itself. Simple evolution. Only a virus which doesn’t kill can spread and survive.

3 hours ago, wotsdermatter said:

In fact, if you check the records, from day one, Viet Nam has done it better than any other country and is still refusing to allow people in.

'nuf sed

Actually, Cambodia did even better than Vietnam, zero deaths.

And Cambodia and Vietnam have kind of reopened its borders, for example so that kids living in one country near the border can go again to the schools in the other country.

And if you have a visa, and fly to Cambodia, you can enter. Not an easy process yet but doable. Much more common sense there than in panicking Thailand - and much less Covid-19.