>>39262

Mate I work in a fucking hospital and the masks were whatever we could get our hands on, you've got to be kidding if you think you're getting anything better to sit in the office.

Anyway it's over. There's bigger things to be worried about. If you still care about covid then I sympathise, but absolutely nobody is going to take you seriously.

Yes this is absolutely going to bite us in the arse when there's a massive winter wave that kills all the pensioners who are still in shock over Are Liz sat in their flat with the heating turned off, but that's the reality of the situation.

>Monkeypox will now be known as mpox, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced, after complaints over racist and stigmatising language linked to the virus's name. The old term will be used alongside the new one for a year, before being phased out.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63782514

PC gawn mad.

Meanwhile, Chinese people are protesting, which they almost never do, against still having to go through lockdowns when everyone else has largely given up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-63785351

The protests started when ten people in Urumqi (which is where the Uyghurs live, coincidentally) died in a fire, supposedly because lockdown rules meant they couldn't leave the burning building.

>>39673
2022 is the gift that goes on giving.

It seems like it's starting to kick off, but I'm not optimistic.

Six children have died with an invasive condition caused by Strep A - including five under 10-year-olds in England - the UK Health Security Agency has said.

UKHSA figures suggest there were:

• 2.3 cases per 100,000 children aged 1-4 compared to an average of 0.5 in 2017 to 2019.

• 1.1 cases per 100,000 children aged 5-9 compared to the pre-pandemic average of 0.3 at the same time of the year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63840591

Reckon this is related to lockdowns weakening immune systems?

>>39675

Definitely. Just anecdotally I've heard a lot about schools being riddled with colds and sore throats and all that, because the kids have been isolated so long, and there's been an uptick in absences at work for parents having to take time off to look after poorly kids.

We will have to wait and see going into the winter flu season, but in my lab we've already got a heaedache with routine covid PCRs picking up flu as well, at a much higher rate than last year. The twin-demic is real, we've just collectively decided it doesn't matter.

>>39676

The kids should have spent all summer eating dog shit and spitting into each other's mouths like we did before PC went mad.

>>39676
Are we going to get a new variant for Christmas? These old ones are getting boring.

>>39678

There's loads, but we've just about given up keeping track. Someone out there still has the unenviable task of categorising them, but they're all just omicron-2-C-beta-nigel and such now. They don't get catchy new names any more because it'd be like naming grains of sand at the beach.

Should I be worried by what's happening in China? It seems like they've got pretty much no immunity over there because of how overzealous their lockdowns have been.

>>39739

If it mutates into anything nasty over there it will appear here and everywhere else eventually - whether or not there are any restrictions applied onto air passengers. I don't think anyone really has the stomach for prolonged restrictions anymore.

>>39739

It's only really something to worry about if a new novel disease comes out.

We're all suffering from the effects of lowered immunity already, it's a delayed effect because the way these things circulate and what have you is so complex, but we're already having a much worse flu season than in years, and the strep throat infection going about the kiddies. We can handle those things, it'll batter us for a few months and maybe do the same next year too, but it's not a serious novel disease threat like covid was to start with.

But yeah if a new super-covid comes out we might just have fucked it.

Is covid real if I never caught it? This is coming from a person who was homeless during the pandemic. The council tried to lock us up in a shitty hotel, but it just made drug and alcohol abuse even worse because we could all meet up in the carpark to have drinks and stuff.

Don't mind me, just waiting for the inevitable "checks on passengers from China is racist" takes.

>>39742
Yes, its real. I assume you're under 40 and aren't in touch with relatives over 70. Flu and cold kills old people, covid is doing a bang up job of accelerating the process.

>>39744
I'm just at a loss of why I never got it.

Your post makes it sound like an old people problem.

>>39745
You probably had it. But it's a "flu", a "cold". If you're young and healthy and /A/ adjacent, then it's just a bad couple of days.

It's not an old people problem, as such, but it's a fact of living now.

>>39745

>Your post makes it sound like an old people problem.

It's an old and ill people problem and basically always has been. People took exception to that characterisation for a variety of reasons, but the data doesn't lie. An 80-year-old is about 75,000% more likely to die as a result of COVID than an 18-year-old. COVID was much more deadly than flu in the initial stages of the pandemic, but not due to any inherent property of the virus - we just didn't have any immunity to it. Now that most people have caught COVID at least once and most of the at-risk groups have been vaccinated, it is fair to say that COVID is basically just like flu.

A tiny handful of young and healthy people have died of COVID, just as a tiny handful of young and healthy people die as a result of complications from colds and flu and all sorts of other diseases that you wouldn't expect to die from. The problem in terms of public health was a cohort I've heard referred to as the "healthy, but..." - people who see themselves as being in basically good health, apart from their laundry list of chronic health problems.

A lot of people who ended up in intensive care were "healthy young people" who were middle-aged, obese, sedentary and drank 100 units a week. I don't say that as a moral judgement, but their bodies were much less young and healthy than they thought. We had to pretend that COVID was a big risk to healthy young people, because so many people who saw themselves as healthy young people were just in total denial about their actual state of health.

>>39747
It's incredibly dangerous to keep pushing the line that Covid is 'like flu'. There is so much else the virus does that can affect us long-term that we don't understand or can't yet treat.

>>39748

The vast majority of the population has caught COVID at least once. We expect most of the population to catch COVID each year, forever. It fundamentally doesn't matter if COVID has some kind of weird and unpredictable long-term effect, because there's no-one left to protect. The horse has bolted and there's no door we can close.

COVID wasn't like flu in 2020. It was a new disease that we didn't know how to treat, didn't have immunity to and didn't have a vaccine for. It is like flu in 2022. We know how to treat it, we have good population-level immunity and we have an effective vaccine. Flu isn't trivial - it kills tens of thousands of people in a bad winter - but it isn't something that most people are afraid of or should be afraid of. Flu is an unpleasant but relatively benign disease in young healthy people, but potentially life-threatening in people who are old or chronically ill. COVID vaccines are far more effective in preventing serious illness than flu vaccines; we expect that flu will kill more people than COVID from this winter onwards.

There's nothing special about COVID and believing otherwise is just a reassuring fiction. Flu or the common cold could mutate at any time to cause some kind of horrendous life-threatening symptoms, as could any other infectious disease. There's a massive reservoir of animal pathogens that (like COVID) could start spreading in humans. The next global pandemic is out there somewhere, just waiting for the right mutation. You probably weren't worrying about those diseases in 2018 and there's no particular reason to worry about them in 2022.

Germophobic paranoia is just as delusional as antivax paranoia. The world is full of stuff that might hypothetically kill you or make you very ill. We can react to those threats like startled deer, or like rational humans. Vaccines have given us all of the protection we're likely to get against COVID. Worry about COVID if you want, but it doesn't merit your attention over any number of other issues.

>>39749
>Flu isn't trivial - it kills tens of thousands of people in a bad winter - but it isn't something that most people are afraid of or should be afraid of.

Broadly agreeing with your post and particularly this point. People seem to have a remarkably poor sense of the severity of risks relative to one another. Observing that we now know enough about COVID-19 to compare it to other hazards isn't being dismissive, it's necessary to live rationally.

>>39748

You have to keep in mind that this is true for many pathogens. Viral and bacterial triggers are suspected to play a part in triggering autoimmune diseases like SLE and ME. Flu itself can have lasting sequelae. The addition of another virus that can potentially cause these problems is of course a bad thing, but the question is the degree to which this new factor warrants caution.

Perhaps we shouldn't be saying that COVID-19 is "just like the flu", but rather it doesn't seem to warrant any unique countermeasures. If you argue that it does, that argument could probably be applied equally to other infectious diseases.

I say all of this from the perspective of someone who would like to see more people getting a flu jab, for what it's worth.

>>39749
Absolutely bizarre post. Did covid write this?

Apparently Ivermectin was known to DARPA as an effective treatment for covid long before the outbreak.

>>39751

OH MY GOD I CAN'T EVEN.

Seriously, what part of it do you disagree with? If you've got a substantive point of disagreement, then air it and you might persuade someone. If you're simply reacting based on the tribal notion that Good People are worried about COVID and Bad People aren't worried about COVID, then you're part of the problem. Our response to COVID in 2020 was based on the facts in 2020; our response in 2022 should be based on the facts in 2022.

>>39752

That's obviously impossible, because ivermectin is not an effective treatment for COVID. If you want to dabble in conspiracy theories, I'd point you to the ADEPT programme, through which DARPA has been funding development of mRNA and rapid antigen test technologies for more than a decade. Obviously this is evidence that the US government agency responsible for funding cutting edge scientific research has been funding cutting edge scientific research, but you can do with it what you wish.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797483

>>39752
SARS and MERS existed long before covid but are very fundamentally similar.
A lot of vaccines and antivirals had the groundwork laid down following those outbreaks and were conveniently a headstart on developing covid treatments. However many covid conspiracies misrepresent this as supposed evidence that governments, companies, and universities and their students were working on treatments for covid before it existed.

>>39754
This. There's a reason the virus behind COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2.

Everyone is cured at last!

>>40089

Well, it's been fun.

Until next time then.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/all-countries-dangerously-unprepared-future-pandemics-says-ifrc-2023-01-30/

Are they any closer to discovering the source of the Covid-19 outbreak or is this impossible because the Chinks covered it up?

>>41193
I wish I could hogtie you, puncture your lung and watch your lips turn purple, you worthless fucking cocksucker.

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>41194

>>41194

Barristerlad, this is what I was on about the other night. Could this lad be arrested and sent to jail for this post?

>>41196

Is a threat believable if both parties know that neither knows who the other is?

>>41194
I'll take that as a no then.

Why aren't the Chinks being held accountable for Covid-19?

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>41198

The evidence that it's a lab leak is purely circumstantial and there's basically no evidence that they did anything reckless or malicious. There's an argument that the Chinese covered things up in the early days of the pandemic, but a) that probably wouldn't have made much of a difference given how slowly the rest of the world reacted and b) it's not illegal. It's not clear that there's anything that they should be held to account for, and even if that were the case there's not really any mechanism for holding them accountable.

It doesn't really matter whether it was a mutation in the wild or a lab leak, because the lessons are the same either way. Whether or not it was a lab leak, we need better regulation of biosecure labs; whether or not it came from a bat or a pangolin, we need better research into diseases with a high risk of zoonotic transmission and better regulation of trade in wild animals. Having someone to blame might make us feel better, but it doesn't do anything to help us prepare for the next pandemic. This pandemic originated in China, but the next pandemic could just as easily start in Nigeria or Vietnam or any number of other places.

>>41199

It really does matter whether it's a lab leak, because it was announced unequivocally not to have been with a rushed article in Nature, and those who thought otherwise were dismissed as conspiracy theorists by Fauci himself.

>>41198

Because frankly the only reason to point fingers at the Chinks in the first place is so Western (mainly the Yanks, but ours are perfectly happy to go along with it) establishments can misdirect public anger from their own piss poor preparation and response, and just another aspect of the soft-cold war pantomime.

China's own response was robust to the point of being excessive, we all saw the videos of them welding shut doors and so on. Those things were also played up for propaganda over here, but it still shows the difference between China's priorities and the West's. China knows it is facing a demographic crisis and can't afford to lose swathes of its populace, so it took the pandemic very seriously- In the West, life is cheap, so our governments did as little as they could get away with.

Not that it necessarily worked, mind you- I have a feeling this is a big factor in the Tories current unpopularity. People might not be able to articulate it, but I think the pandemic really took the wool off some people's eyes that the government simply isn't there to look after us in the way it used to be. I think particularly for the older generation, it finally got the message through that the post-war social-democratic civil contract has been completely slashed and burned.

>Covid is "well on the way" to becoming seasonal, Prof Hunter says, with flu likely to cause more deaths from now on. And eventually, Covid will become "just another cause of the common cold", like the other coronaviruses that circulate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66994137

So now that Covid is apparently just another seasonal cold, does that mean we'll get more colds or do you reckon it'll be about the same?

>>41198
>Chinks

You're spending too long hanging around with septics.

>>41202
What did your friends and family when you were growing up refer to a Chinese takeaway as?

>>41203
A Chinese, Nigel.

Beyond an ethnic slur you're also equating the actions of the Chinese Communist Party with the people. Something it does itself so that nobody imagines life without the party and any criticism of its actions becomes a criticism of the Chinese people.

>>41204
Well, lah-di-dah. I didn't realise I was speaking with Lord Poshington, who's never used the word Chinky in his life.

>>41202
>>41204

I feel like "chink" has got to be one of the least offensive racial slurs. And it shouldn't be hard to tell that anyone using it in this kind of context is doing it in a deliberately provocative way, which sort of means it doesn't count, because you're taking the bait if you bite like this.

>>41206
Sorry, Baddiel, we've done the laddish, ironic, racism bollocks before and it was shit then. It should stay dead in the 90s, like thinking psychologists are magic and the threat of a Cold War gone hot.

>>41207
You leave Derren Brown out of this.

>>41207

I can't tell what level of irony you are operating to come out with something this topsy turvy, but it terrifies me that it might be none at all.

Anyway stop being an anti semite, you anti semite. You do realise that's worse than rape, misgendering someone, or voting LibDem combined, right? I bet you're on rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk right now sympathising with Hamas daft militant wogs just because they're 10 year olds or pregnant women.

https://news.sky.com/story/deadly-cat-virus-that-swept-cyprus-found-in-uk-everything-you-need-to-know-13008892

>Deadly cat virus that swept Cyprus found in UK: Everything you need to know

>Thousands of cats in Cyprus have died from feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), which is caused by a cat coronavirus. Now the strain of the virus has been found in the UK - with an expert warning it's "pretty terrifying".


ITZ!!

>>41265
No idea what the potential for crossing species is here, but this may be the opportunity for people to get COVID-24 before it's cool.

>>41266
>COVID-24
Surely it’ll have a proper name by then. “Coronavirus” didn’t work because they’re all coronaviruses, plus I think that was the virus and Covid-19 was the disease it turned into, like HIV and AIDS. But “CoViD-19”, as I presume the correct capitalisation must be, is short for “coronavirus disease 2019”, which again isn’t really a proper name, just a description. It’s not like gingivitis or yellow fever. And neither of those caused half the global panic of Xi Jinping’s unnamed mind-control coof.

If I can, I’d like to propose Dung Lung because it’s shitty, it affects your lungs, and that name does sound a bit Chinese.

>>41267
>Surely it’ll have a proper name by then.

Catrona virus.

>>41268

CATVID-23.


Which vaguely sounds like overpriced cat food.