Coronavirus outbreak

[kingofsurrey]

41 minutes ago, spur1 said:

There is one and only one reason to send kids back to school in June. 
Daycare. 

Or is you don't like your parents / grandparents / elderly neighbours....

[bree2]

40 minutes ago, spur1 said:

There is one and only one reason to send kids back to school in June. 
Daycare. 

well none of my grandkids will be going back until at least September or until it is safe for them. why put kids in harms way now!

[Wilbur]

24 minutes ago, Silky mitts said:

Rumours gyms reopen May 19?

On the Island, I believe.

44 minutes ago, EdgarM said:

I think Wilbur is bang on with this, not too far left and not too far right, but striking the right "balance" overall. 

We are not going to stop this from afflicting "everyone" and we don't want it to run free in the population. 

We know who is the most vulnerable and we know where the most cases are concentrated and we should use this information to manage this pandemic moving forward.

I believe Dr. Henry is doing a good job overall but I think her plan could be fine tuned a bit to give more detail on specific locales and specific population groups so we are not all grouped into "one size fits all" mentality. Some people could probably continue on with their lives with a little more normalcy without risking themselves greatly, while others should not be leaving their residency without exposing themselves to great danger. I think that's why there is so much confusion as to what we "should be" doing or "not" doing during this pandemic.

I do wonder if the lack of the detail on specific locales is due to giving people a false sense of security.  Unless you're locking down by region, it doesn't take much or long for cases to spread from one region to the next.  So perhaps North Eastern BC is fine but all it takes is a few groups of people travelling from the coast who may not even know they're are infected to spread it there.

This is where contact tracing is key.  As far as I know testing is available to pretty much to anyone that is showing symptoms and asks for it.  It won't stop the spread but it'll hopefully really slow things down.

Edited May 15, 2020 by Wilbur

[stawns]

50 minutes ago, spur1 said:

There is one and only one reason to send kids back to school in June. 
Daycare. 

Actually, they're considering it a test drive for September.  That's why we're going back.........and it's entirely voluntary.

[kingofsurrey]

Just now, stawns said:

Actually, they're considering it a test drive for September.  That's why we're going back.........and it's entirely voluntary.

Not voluntary for teachers kids though... is it ?

[kingofsurrey]

Lucky teachers...

 

Get to teach all day all the kids the choose to go to school June 1

Then they get to spend all evening working online with those that chose to work from home and not attend schools.  Teachers working 12 hours day now ? Really ?

 

#HorganHASnoPLAN 

[PistolPete13]

On 5/14/2020 at 12:02 PM, Warhippy said:

American People angry about this.  Understandably so if true.  Should never have an unqualified person speaking about matters of experts.  Like ever

 

Now, let's get Jared Kushner to delve in to Israeli peace talks and hand him the file to handling the coronavirus issue in America while also allowing Ivanka Trump unfettered access to numerous high profile issue in America today all at the behest of our 6 time count em 6 time bankrupt reality tv president

 

 

 

Greta Thunberg was on the program, much like Alicia Keys was a few weeks ago.

They were not there as “doctors” nor were either of asked to express any views on what they thought the cure was.

Keyes sang a song and Thunberg expressed concerns about how the pandemic affected marginalized children in the Southern Hemisphere. 
Pretty innocuous stuff and certainly nowhere close to speaking about matters that should be left to the experts. In fact Thunberg put her money where her mouth is by donating $100,000 to a fund that helps marginalized children.

Anderson Cooper explained that Trump Junior (DJTJ) and others tried to stir the pot when they saw Thunberg’s picture on CNNs ads promoting the program.

 

Following the trail of bread crumbs:

 

DJTJ and others see ad as an opportunity to create buzz that CNN is using quacks to push medical advice.

Spread the lie amoung  Trump’s  rabid base.

And voila! Americans are angry about this.

 

Only in America.

[EdgarM]

16 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

On the Island, I believe.

I do wonder if the lack of the detail on specific locales is due to giving people a false sense of security.  Unless you're locking down by region, it doesn't take much or long for cases to spread from one region to the next.  So perhaps North Eastern BC is fine but all it takes is a few groups of people travelling from the coast who may not even know they're are infected to spread it there.

This is where contact tracing is key.  As far as I know testing is available to pretty much to anyone that is showing symptoms and asks for it.  It won't stop the spread but it'll hopefully really slow things down.

Yes that is a concern and "travel" still is a concern that all have to be wary of. People travelling is how we got into this in the first place. If people are going to move around then they should agree to some form of tracing(i.e. phone app) or they can just stay home.

[skategal]

I was on a Zoom meeting this morning with mostly US fitness people, for the most part they are saying that the fitness facilities they are working at are opening next week.  Couple of exceptions, Ireland not til mid August.  One big box gym will have one hour appts, have to book ahead and only allowed 3 appts per week.  Another is measuring out 8 foot spaces for classes, met at the door, hands sprayed, have to walk onto a disinfectant cloth, then go straight to your square.  All equipment for the class is in the square, leave right after.  No changeroom/shower facilities.  Classes booked with an hour between to allow for cleaning/sanitizing. 

 

General consensus was that no one was comfortable and felt the fitness facilities were opening too soon.  

 

Vancouver did some interesting polling that was released yesterday.  Asked how many people would be willing to return to a gym.  About 60ish percent if there was adequate cleaning would return.  Heavily weighted to men, women not so comfortable.  Many won't return until there is a vaccine.  At least that was the thought at the point in time the survey was done.  That may change down the road as people see a continued slow spread of the virus (fingers crossed). 

[RUPERTKBD]

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/lancet-editorial-blasts-trumps-inconsistent-and-incoherent-coronavirus-response/ar-BB148Bfo?li=AAggFp5
 

Quote

 

One of the world’s oldest and best-known medical journals on Friday slammed President Trump’s “inconsistent and incoherent national response” to the novel coronavirus pandemic and accused the administration of relegating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to a “nominal” role.

The unsigned editorial from the Lancet concluded that Trump should be replaced. “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics,” said the journal, which was founded in Britain in 1823.

The strongly worded critique highlights mounting frustration with the administration’s response among some of the world’s top medical researchers. It’s not uncommon for medical journals to run signed editorials that take political stances, but rarely do publications use the full weight of their editorial boards to call for a president to be voted out of office.

The Lancet published the editorial as the death toll in the United States surpassed 85,000 and many states moved to reopen businesses and ease coronavirus restrictions that experts say are necessary to contain the virus.

The journal said that while infection and death rates have declined in hard-hit states such as New York and New Jersey after two months of lockdown, new outbreaks in Minnesota and Iowa have raised questions about the efficacy of the Trump administration’s response.

The authors accused the administration of undermining some of the CDC’s top officials, saying the agency “has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser.” They noted that the agency, which is supposed to be the primary contact for health authorities during crises, has been hamstrung by years of budget cuts. The editorial said the administration left an “intelligence vacuum” in China when it pulled the last CDC officer from the country in July 2019.

The Lancet also took the CDC to task for its botched rollout of diagnostic testing in the critical early weeks that the virus began to spread in the United States. The country remains ill-equipped to provide basic surveillance or laboratory testing to combat the disease, the journal said.

“There is no doubt that the CDC has made mistakes, especially on testing in the early stages of the pandemic,” the editorial said. “But punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution.”

“The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets — vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear,” it continued. “But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency.”

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning.

 

 

[Ronaldoescobar]

21 minutes ago, RUPERTKBD said:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/lancet-editorial-blasts-trumps-inconsistent-and-incoherent-coronavirus-response/ar-BB148Bfo?li=AAggFp5
 

 

Whelp, guess the lancet will be labeled a lefty communist rag. Such is the way of the world these days.

[RUPERTKBD]

Donald Trump: "We're leading the world in Coronavirus response"

 

The World: "Say what?"

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/coronavirus/world-agog-as-trump-flails-over-pandemic-despite-claims-us-leads-way/ar-BB147Tvk?li=AAggNb9#image=BB147rDT|2

 

Quote

 

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.

 

Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.

 

“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

 

The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

 

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

 

The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”

 

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

 

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

 

Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.

 

“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”

Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.

 

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.

“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”

 

In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.

 

Esmir Milavić, an editor at Bosnia’s N1 TV channel, told viewers this week: “The White House is in utter dysfunction and doesn’t speak with one voice.”

 

Milavić said: “The vice-president is wearing a mask, while the president doesn’t; some staffers wear them, some don’t. Everybody acts as they please. As time passes, White House begins to look more and more like the Balkans.”

 

After Trump’s disinfectant comments, Beppe Severgnini, a columnist for Italy’s Corriere della Sera, said in a TV interview: “Trying to get into Donald Trump’s head is more difficult than finding a vaccine for coronavirus. First he decided on a lockdown and then he encouraged protests against the lockdown that he promoted. It’s like a Mel Brooks film.”

 

In several countries, the local health authorities have felt obliged to put out statements to counter “health advice” coming from the White House, concerning the ingestion of disinfectant and taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug found to be ineffective against Covid-19 and potentially lethal.

 

The Nigerian government put out a warning that there is no “hard evidence that chloroquine is effective in prevention or management of coronavirus infection” after three people were hospitalised from overdosing on the drug in Lagos. It was not enough to prevent a fivefold increase in the price of the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

 

Trump’s decision not to take part in a global effort to find a vaccine, and his abrupt severance of financial support to the WHO at the height of the pandemic, added outrage and prompted complaints that the US was surrendering its role of global leadership.

 

“If there is any world leader who can be accused of handling the current crisis badly, it is Donald Trump, whose initial disdain for Covid-19 may have cost thousands of Americans their lives,” an editorial in the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper said last month.

 

The newspaper said Trump had only decided to take Covid seriously after finding himself “cornered by the facts” – and expressed shock at his decision to halt WHO funding.

“Even by the standards of his behaviour, the level of impudence is astonishing for the holder of an office that, until just a few years ago, was a considered reference in leadership for the democratic world,” it said.

 

Nowhere in the world is the US response to the pandemic more routinely castigated than in China. It is hardly surprising. Trump has consistently pointed to Chinese culpability in failing to contain the outbreak in its early stages, and the pandemic has become the central battleground for global leadership between the established superpower and the emerging challenger.

 

There is a palpable sense of relief among Chinese state commentators that the US president’s antics have diverted some of the anger that would otherwise have been aimed at Beijing.

 

“Only by making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans,” said an English-language Global Times editorial late last month.

 

First bolded: What would an article about Trump be without a baldfaced lie? Does anyone believe that Merkel, Abe, or any other head of state believe "The US is leading the way"? Only if he means leading the way in Covid 19 deaths....

 

Second bolded: I had to include this, because you know you've really fracked things up when a guy from Bosnia says, "Hey, sucks to be you, man..."

[RUPERTKBD]

Just now, Ronaldoescobar said:

Whelp, guess the lancet will be labeled a lefty communist rag. Such is the way of the world these days.

Well, it is run by scientists......

[-Vintage Canuck-]

 

[RUPERTKBD]

9 minutes ago, -Vintage Canuck- said:

 

From zero to stupid in 3.4 seconds.....

[Ralph.]

1 hour ago, RUPERTKBD said:

From zero to stupid in 3.4 seconds.....

How about this kid going 308 Km/H in Ontario?

 

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/unbelievable-young-driver-caught-allegedly-speeding-308-km-h-on-ontario-highway-1.4932981

 

Quote

 

TORONTO -- The OPP says they caught a young driver allegedly speeding at 308 kilometres an hour on the QEW Saturday night.

 

“This is the fastest speed that I’ve ever heard of,” OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt said in a video posted to Twitter Sunday morning.

 

Schmidt said that the 19-year-old driver was in his father’s car at the time of the incident with another 19-year-old passenger alongside him.

 

“Unbelievable speeds, we’re talking 191 miles an hour, we’re talking 85 metres a second, 280 feet per second,” Schmidt said, questioning how a driver could properly react to potential obstacles on the highway at those speeds.

 

Schmidt said that the driver was stopped near Burlington and was subsequently charged with stunt driving under the Highway Traffic Act as well as a criminal charge of dangerous driving.

 

The driver’s licence has also been suspended for seven days and the vehicle has been impounded for the same amount of time.

 

“This is absolutely egregious for anyone to be going those kinds of speeds,” Schmidt said. “The speed limit is 100, there’s areas where it’s 110. When you’re going triple the speed limit, I don’t even know where to begin with that.”

 

“So I’m pretty much speechless on this one.”

 

 

Absolutely insane and incredibly dangerous for everyone else on the road, let alone the kids driving the vehicle. He should lose his license for a year, if you ask me.

Edited May 15, 2020 by Gäz

[skategal]

Can't believe the car was only impounded for 7 days.  Should have been minimum of a month.  

[RUPERTKBD]

45 minutes ago, Gäz said:

How about this kid going 308 Km/H in Ontario?

 

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/unbelievable-young-driver-caught-allegedly-speeding-308-km-h-on-ontario-highway-1.4932981

 

 

Absolutely insane and incredibly dangerous for everyone else on the road, let alone the kids driving the vehicle. He should lose his license for a year, if you ask me.

I saw that. Funny thing is, it's only the second dumbest thing done by a kid in a car this week:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/utah-boy-driver.html

Edited May 15, 2020 by RUPERTKBD

[bree2]

an outbreak at our Abbotsford Hospital today, six staff and one patient. 

[nuckin_futz]

2 hours ago, -Vintage Canuck- said:

 

Maybe if you go fast enough the virus can't catch you?