Coronavirus Thread: Worldwide Pandemic
- Thread starter 88m3
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ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
$cam-U-Well_Jack$on
Superstar
Of course, it likely will.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Britain’s About to Show the World What a Third Wave of Covid Looks Like
Something dark, stupid, and dangerous is brewing in Britain. Isn’t it always, these days? This time, it’s not Brexit. It’s a third wave of Covid. And this one is going to be bad — in many ways, worse than the first two. Brexit Britain, the dumbest country on earth, is about to teach the world what a third wave of Covid looks like, and how damaging it can really be.
Let’s begin with some numbers — grim and foreboding one. Covid cases are on the rise in Britain again. But not just any Covid cases. Cases of the “Delta” variant. That’s the one which originated in India. The Delta variant is now the dominant strain in Britain, accounting for 90% of new cases. And cases are doubling about every week. There are 8,000 new cases today. Doesn’t sound like a lot. But in a month, at the current “R,” or rate of doubling, that’s going to be 64,000. And in six weeks, it’s going to 256,000.
That’s how fast a third wave can erupt. Britain seems to have forgotten that the world is dealing with a pandemic, a thing which obeys laws of exponential growth.
But that’s just the beginning. The Delta variant is worse than the original one. A lot worse. Twice as many patients end up hospitalized. It’s worse among young people and the already ill, and of course the elderly too — it hits everyone harder.
If you think that’s bad, consider this. 30% of deaths from the Delta variant were among the fully vaccinated. What does that tell us? The Delta variant is vaccine resistant. It’s the first variant to really challenge the vaccines we already have — but it won’t be the last.
How vaccine resistant is it? Two doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine — which is the one most Brits have got — is 60% effective again the Delta variant. Most people in the UK who are vaccinated still only have one dose.
Add that all up. A new variant, doubling every week. It’s vaccine resistant, to the tune of making the main vaccine in the country almost irrelevant. And so twice as many people are hospitalized. And then, 30% of deaths are people who are fully vaccinated. Shuddering yet? You should be, even if you’re not British. Because this is what a third wave looks like.
Britain’s been in lockdown for the winter, and the spring. Brits were looking forward to the country reopening on June 21st. It’s not going to happen. It would be like giving the virus a massive get out of jail free card. That means Brits will have to stay locked down again, through the summer — a third season of lockdown. Sound fun to you?
So how did Britain end up here? It’s a sad, stupid, astonishing story of incompetence, malice, and ignorance, from the dumbest government — and society — on planet earth. I mean that. Let me tell you the story.
How did the Delta variant come to be? Well, it mutated in India. Because, in large part, of Britain’s nationalistic greed and hubris. Oxford developed the “AstraZeneca” vaccine. Its creators — researchers — pledged to make it open source, available to manufacture and develop anywhere. After all, this was a global pandemic. And yet — with some helpful intervention from Bill Gates — the Oxford vaccine was privatized. Given exclusively to AstraZeneca, Britain’s key pharmaceutical corporation.
So instead of vaccinating the world — or at least helping the world get vaccinated — Britain engaged in the stupid, selfish game of vaccine nationalism. It kept its newly privatised vaccine for itself. It prevented even Europe from having the Oxford vaccine. What was being selfish about a vaccine going to do? Breed vaccine resistance.
In India, meanwhile, there weren’t enough vaccines available. So Covid mutated and mutated, until new mutations could “escape” the vaccine, by altering the shape of the “spike protein.” If all that sounds like gibberish to you, don’t worry — the point is simple. By keeping its vaccine to itself, all Britain did was ensure that variants resistant to it would breed at light speed, in the world’s worst hit countries — like India.
That was the first mistake — and it was a colossally stupid one. And yet the British simply shrugged at the idea of giving vaccines to the world. “Who cares?!” was the general feeling, in a nation gripped by nationalist fervour.
And all that led to the second one. Britain didn’t close its borders to India nearly fast enough. Why not? Because, in large part, its government was riding high on a wave of nationalism. It had created a scapegoat — Europe — and was so busy attacking it in endless, tedious Brexit “negotiations,” that it simply ignored Covid more or less altogether. To the point that when Covid broke out, it shrugged, and pointed to “herd immunity” — aka mass death — as the natural solution. What on earth?
All that led to the third mistake. In this nationalist fever, Britain decided to follow its own vaccination policy — one which went straight against science. It delayed giving people a second dose by huge amounts of time — twelve weeks, when the second dose was to be had in three, if you asked the scientists who created vaccines. Why did it do this? To score political points. It could say that more people were “vaccinated,” faster, instead of actually getting people fully vaccinated, fast.
Let me make that point concrete. America stumbled badly under Trump when it came to Covid. But when Biden took power, America did a fantastic job on Covid. Why? In most states, there’s a massive, massive industrial scale vaccination effort. People get vaccinated fast, in vast vaccination centers, set up in malls, stadiums, auditoriums, and so forth — by whole teams of nurses and managers and assistants specially drafted in, to form crisis teams. It’s a proper emergency response, on a massive national level, unlike anything, really, in modern American history. For once, America did a good job.
But that’s because Biden put science first. Not politics. He understood that playing political games could be disastrous — the point was to vaccinate people fast. Boris Johnson’s government, by contrast, played political games with science — delaying vaccinations so that it could give the impression of a fully vaccinated nation when in fact this was not the case.
That has led to disaster. The majority of Brits still have only had one dose of a vaccine. Which vaccine? The one which doesn’t work very well against a new variant. Why is that variant vaccine resistant to begin with? Because Britain was too greedy and selfish to help vaccinate the world, fast — it was so stupid and foolish it didn’t even bother vaccinating itself.
It should be said here that the problem isn’t and wasn’t just Boris Johnson. The average Brit today exists in a bubble of self-satisfied delusion. Boris and his ilk have given the average Brit a set of scapegoats — Europeans, immigrants, foreigners — and in response, the average Brit, snarling in stupid rage, backs them to the hilt. That’s not a joke, or an exaggeration — despite the economic ruin of Brexit, despite already having the highest Covid death rate in Europe, despite all the harm and folly, the average Brit still backs the conservatives politically, and shows no sign of wavering whatsoever. The conservatives can “do no wrong,” pundits say. But they have done wrong — they have wrecked a society’s economy, culture, and now its public health — and the most generous thing that can be said is that Brits have become a nation of witless idiots for supporting them as they do it.
Put all that together, and what do you see? I see a picture of a broken nation, staggering from crisis to crisis, each one worse than the last — and yet embracing its own self-destruction, because at least demagogues have given it someone to hate. But I digress. This particular crisis — Covid’s third wave — how will it shake out?
It will probably be horrific. There will probably be lower numbers overall, simply because people have already had Covid. But the rate of hospitalisation will be higher than the last wave. Because this variant hits people harder and makes them sicker. That will cause yet another crisis — the NHS, already overwhelmed, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, disrespected, underpaid, hated by the very conservative government and fanatically nationalist populace which they’re trying to care for — will buckle and continue to break.
And what the last two waves globally teach us is: it’s when a healthcare system is overwhelmed that things get really bad. But because this variant hospitalises more people, it’s almost certainly going to push the already badly, badly stressed NHS to breaking point. That means a higher mortality rate. More people will needlessly die. This time, probably plenty of younger ones.
Covid’s third wave, meanwhile, will necessitate another lockdown. The half-hearted kind Britain specialises in. Not really strong enough to break the virus — just enough to eviscerate the economy. The economy will suffer intensely. And Brits, already resentful, sullen, angry that nationalism isn’t working for them — it never does — will probably just continue to flout social distancing and lockdown rules like they’ve been accustomed to doing.
While all that’s going on, because the government is so incompetent and malicious — and because the average Brit seems not to care at all about current events, let alone a pandemic — there’s not going to be any real change in its clearly badly inadequate vaccination policy. There won’t be the kind of mass scale vaccination program there is even in America, a true emergency response at a social scale. Vaccinations will still proceed at a snails’ pace — because, remember, the point in Britain isn’t to vaccinate people well, fast, or with the best vaccine, but to play political games and score political points.
It’s going to be a hard summer for Britain. But it’s already been a hard spring, and a hard winter. But Brits don’t care. They’ve been beaten into a position of identifying with and admiring their abusers. They want to be abusers now, too — to Europeans, immigrants, foreigners, even Meghan and Harry (LOL.) The problem is that you can’t abuse your way out of a pandemic. You have to do the one thing modern-day Britain isn’t capable of anymore. Care.
Something dark, stupid, and dangerous is brewing in Britain. Isn’t it always, these days? This time, it’s not Brexit. It’s a third wave of Covid. And this one is going to be bad — in many ways, worse than the first two. Brexit Britain, the dumbest country on earth, is about to teach the world what a third wave of Covid looks like, and how damaging it can really be.
Let’s begin with some numbers — grim and foreboding one. Covid cases are on the rise in Britain again. But not just any Covid cases. Cases of the “Delta” variant. That’s the one which originated in India. The Delta variant is now the dominant strain in Britain, accounting for 90% of new cases. And cases are doubling about every week. There are 8,000 new cases today. Doesn’t sound like a lot. But in a month, at the current “R,” or rate of doubling, that’s going to be 64,000. And in six weeks, it’s going to 256,000.
That’s how fast a third wave can erupt. Britain seems to have forgotten that the world is dealing with a pandemic, a thing which obeys laws of exponential growth.
But that’s just the beginning. The Delta variant is worse than the original one. A lot worse. Twice as many patients end up hospitalized. It’s worse among young people and the already ill, and of course the elderly too — it hits everyone harder.
If you think that’s bad, consider this. 30% of deaths from the Delta variant were among the fully vaccinated. What does that tell us? The Delta variant is vaccine resistant. It’s the first variant to really challenge the vaccines we already have — but it won’t be the last.
How vaccine resistant is it? Two doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine — which is the one most Brits have got — is 60% effective again the Delta variant. Most people in the UK who are vaccinated still only have one dose.
Add that all up. A new variant, doubling every week. It’s vaccine resistant, to the tune of making the main vaccine in the country almost irrelevant. And so twice as many people are hospitalized. And then, 30% of deaths are people who are fully vaccinated. Shuddering yet? You should be, even if you’re not British. Because this is what a third wave looks like.
Britain’s been in lockdown for the winter, and the spring. Brits were looking forward to the country reopening on June 21st. It’s not going to happen. It would be like giving the virus a massive get out of jail free card. That means Brits will have to stay locked down again, through the summer — a third season of lockdown. Sound fun to you?
So how did Britain end up here? It’s a sad, stupid, astonishing story of incompetence, malice, and ignorance, from the dumbest government — and society — on planet earth. I mean that. Let me tell you the story.
How did the Delta variant come to be? Well, it mutated in India. Because, in large part, of Britain’s nationalistic greed and hubris. Oxford developed the “AstraZeneca” vaccine. Its creators — researchers — pledged to make it open source, available to manufacture and develop anywhere. After all, this was a global pandemic. And yet — with some helpful intervention from Bill Gates — the Oxford vaccine was privatized. Given exclusively to AstraZeneca, Britain’s key pharmaceutical corporation.
So instead of vaccinating the world — or at least helping the world get vaccinated — Britain engaged in the stupid, selfish game of vaccine nationalism. It kept its newly privatised vaccine for itself. It prevented even Europe from having the Oxford vaccine. What was being selfish about a vaccine going to do? Breed vaccine resistance.
In India, meanwhile, there weren’t enough vaccines available. So Covid mutated and mutated, until new mutations could “escape” the vaccine, by altering the shape of the “spike protein.” If all that sounds like gibberish to you, don’t worry — the point is simple. By keeping its vaccine to itself, all Britain did was ensure that variants resistant to it would breed at light speed, in the world’s worst hit countries — like India.
That was the first mistake — and it was a colossally stupid one. And yet the British simply shrugged at the idea of giving vaccines to the world. “Who cares?!” was the general feeling, in a nation gripped by nationalist fervour.
And all that led to the second one. Britain didn’t close its borders to India nearly fast enough. Why not? Because, in large part, its government was riding high on a wave of nationalism. It had created a scapegoat — Europe — and was so busy attacking it in endless, tedious Brexit “negotiations,” that it simply ignored Covid more or less altogether. To the point that when Covid broke out, it shrugged, and pointed to “herd immunity” — aka mass death — as the natural solution. What on earth?
All that led to the third mistake. In this nationalist fever, Britain decided to follow its own vaccination policy — one which went straight against science. It delayed giving people a second dose by huge amounts of time — twelve weeks, when the second dose was to be had in three, if you asked the scientists who created vaccines. Why did it do this? To score political points. It could say that more people were “vaccinated,” faster, instead of actually getting people fully vaccinated, fast.
Let me make that point concrete. America stumbled badly under Trump when it came to Covid. But when Biden took power, America did a fantastic job on Covid. Why? In most states, there’s a massive, massive industrial scale vaccination effort. People get vaccinated fast, in vast vaccination centers, set up in malls, stadiums, auditoriums, and so forth — by whole teams of nurses and managers and assistants specially drafted in, to form crisis teams. It’s a proper emergency response, on a massive national level, unlike anything, really, in modern American history. For once, America did a good job.
But that’s because Biden put science first. Not politics. He understood that playing political games could be disastrous — the point was to vaccinate people fast. Boris Johnson’s government, by contrast, played political games with science — delaying vaccinations so that it could give the impression of a fully vaccinated nation when in fact this was not the case.
That has led to disaster. The majority of Brits still have only had one dose of a vaccine. Which vaccine? The one which doesn’t work very well against a new variant. Why is that variant vaccine resistant to begin with? Because Britain was too greedy and selfish to help vaccinate the world, fast — it was so stupid and foolish it didn’t even bother vaccinating itself.
It should be said here that the problem isn’t and wasn’t just Boris Johnson. The average Brit today exists in a bubble of self-satisfied delusion. Boris and his ilk have given the average Brit a set of scapegoats — Europeans, immigrants, foreigners — and in response, the average Brit, snarling in stupid rage, backs them to the hilt. That’s not a joke, or an exaggeration — despite the economic ruin of Brexit, despite already having the highest Covid death rate in Europe, despite all the harm and folly, the average Brit still backs the conservatives politically, and shows no sign of wavering whatsoever. The conservatives can “do no wrong,” pundits say. But they have done wrong — they have wrecked a society’s economy, culture, and now its public health — and the most generous thing that can be said is that Brits have become a nation of witless idiots for supporting them as they do it.
Put all that together, and what do you see? I see a picture of a broken nation, staggering from crisis to crisis, each one worse than the last — and yet embracing its own self-destruction, because at least demagogues have given it someone to hate. But I digress. This particular crisis — Covid’s third wave — how will it shake out?
It will probably be horrific. There will probably be lower numbers overall, simply because people have already had Covid. But the rate of hospitalisation will be higher than the last wave. Because this variant hits people harder and makes them sicker. That will cause yet another crisis — the NHS, already overwhelmed, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, disrespected, underpaid, hated by the very conservative government and fanatically nationalist populace which they’re trying to care for — will buckle and continue to break.
And what the last two waves globally teach us is: it’s when a healthcare system is overwhelmed that things get really bad. But because this variant hospitalises more people, it’s almost certainly going to push the already badly, badly stressed NHS to breaking point. That means a higher mortality rate. More people will needlessly die. This time, probably plenty of younger ones.
Covid’s third wave, meanwhile, will necessitate another lockdown. The half-hearted kind Britain specialises in. Not really strong enough to break the virus — just enough to eviscerate the economy. The economy will suffer intensely. And Brits, already resentful, sullen, angry that nationalism isn’t working for them — it never does — will probably just continue to flout social distancing and lockdown rules like they’ve been accustomed to doing.
While all that’s going on, because the government is so incompetent and malicious — and because the average Brit seems not to care at all about current events, let alone a pandemic — there’s not going to be any real change in its clearly badly inadequate vaccination policy. There won’t be the kind of mass scale vaccination program there is even in America, a true emergency response at a social scale. Vaccinations will still proceed at a snails’ pace — because, remember, the point in Britain isn’t to vaccinate people well, fast, or with the best vaccine, but to play political games and score political points.
It’s going to be a hard summer for Britain. But it’s already been a hard spring, and a hard winter. But Brits don’t care. They’ve been beaten into a position of identifying with and admiring their abusers. They want to be abusers now, too — to Europeans, immigrants, foreigners, even Meghan and Harry (LOL.) The problem is that you can’t abuse your way out of a pandemic. You have to do the one thing modern-day Britain isn’t capable of anymore. Care.
BK The Great
Veteran
Even the already vaccinated can catch the variants? But will they be safe? And now it’s evolving to another strain. And this is why people will need a booster or another shot.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
The AstraZeneca doesn’t work as strong against this new strain. No clue about mRNA vaccines.
The big story is them fukking over India and now reaping what they sow.
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BK The Great
Veteran
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
This is why we need to open the IP and let these nations manufacture vaccines instead of donating like the G7 nations are doing now.
Kyle C. Barker
Migos VERZUZ Mahalia Jackson
And a minor shot at bill fukking gates being a scourge to the open source community going on 4 decades now.
He really loves them protected patents.
Kyle C. Barker
Migos VERZUZ Mahalia Jackson
A third shot was already in the cards, because we can't trust the fukking world to act as one. Just got to keep playing it safe, and get vaccinated. If you don't want to, your choice, but these mutations are happening and while everyone has some form of protection, your just open to something worse.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
AZ is 60% mRNA is 80-90.
The British government is stupid, yes, but that article is a little over the top.
It really depends on if BOJO listens to the scientists, or pushes us head first into a 3rd wave.
I am also pretty sure that AZ/Oxford has a manufacturing plant in India. Indeed, the AZ vaccines received in the Caribbean were produced in India, so the writer is ignoring a lot of other facts, to make his point.
choc_cardigan
Squad
I was about to say that was hypebeast shyt
