Thoughts on coronavirus...

[Masato]

[Masato]

[Masato]

Can someone help me understand the difference here?

What the fuck is the difference between a 'social circle', a 'social bubble', and a 'social gathering'? Why some groups of 10 can hug and sit together but other groups of 10 must distance?

These are the official rules in my area as of today, but maybe I'm missing something:



A social circle of 10 has different rules than a social gathering of 10.
I guess





so weird that they are just casually suggesting that we actually require government's permission to hug our family.

seriously, think about that lol

No dictator regime before has likely even gone that far

[Masato]

'legitimate source'

'credible scientists'

'conspiracy theories'

[spoiler]

[Shinkicker]

Holy shit cakes!

[Masato]

is this actually about coronovirus?

doesn't make it any better but I'd be curious, that's the claim on the post

[Som-Pong]

I don’t care

[Masato]

annoying but makes some points:

[Masato]

[Masato]

PDF read/download:

What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop
https://www.academia.edu/42829792/What_ ... _Full_Stop

[spoiler]

What Went WrongCorona and the World after the Full Stop
Carlo Caduff, King’s College LondonPaper accepted for publication in
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
“It is as though mankind had divided itselfbetween those who believe in human omnipotence(who think that everything is possible if one knowshow to organize masses for it) and those for whompowerlessness has become the major experienceof their lives.”
Hannah Arendt
The measures that governments across the world have taken to contain the spreadof coronavirus disease are massive and unprecedented. As a result of thesemeasures, life has come to an almost complete standstill, with many countriesunder lockdown. Never in the history of humanity have such drastic interventionsinto the lives of populations occurred in the name of health on such a scale and insuch a short period of time.As a result of the world’s largest and perhaps most stringent lockdown, millions ofdaily wage laborers have lost their source of income in India. Healthcare workershave been attacked and evicted from their homes because they are seen aspotential spreaders of contagious disease (Kalra and Ghoshal 2020). Neighborhoodshave been scared into panic when an ambulance appears on the street. Due to thesudden ban on any form of transportation, migrant workers have been strandedbetween the cities where they used to work and the villages where their families areliving (Daniyal et al 2020). Cancer patients have been unable to receive essentialmedical care because they cannot reach the hospital. It is the poor, themarginalized and the vulnerable that are most affected by drastic measures,exacerbating already existing inequalities.In Kenya, the police enforced a coronavirus curfew using teargas and excessiveforce against presumable violators of lockdown law (Namwaya 2020). InBangladesh, the government created a special unit to monitor social media andarrest people for spreading “misinformation” about the virus (Hrw 2020). InHungary, parliament passed a law allowing Prime Minister Orbán to limit freedomof speech, defer elections and suspend rules and regulations by decree (Gebrekidan2020). In India, state governments released companies from the purview of laborlaws, including occupational health laws, to stimulate the economy (Sharma 2020).


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In Lebanon, the currency collapsed, leaving 75% of the population in need of foodaid (Chulov 2020). In the United States, over 33 million people have filed forunemployment benefits (Rushe and Aratani 2020).Unfortunately, as of the writing of this paper, many things remain completelyunknown in this pandemic despite intensive investigation. For example, we don’tknow what helped contain the outbreak in China, and particularly if governmentinterventions reduced the spread of the virus or if the virus burned out there beforemoving on to other susceptible populations. The fact is: We simply don’t know.Nevertheless, many actors and institutions have proceeded as if they did know,imposing extreme measures that have affected billions of people and that havepushed societies to the edge of collapse by creating poverty, hunger, misery, debt,and unemployment. Today, many wonder how we ended up where we are. How was it possible for avirus to trigger such a massive response that continues to threaten society and theeconomy, with so little discussion about the costs and consequences of extrememeasures? Why is there widespread agreement that aggressive interventions to“flatten the curve” were necessary and justified? It seems that this unprecedentedpublic health experiment occurred without sufficient consideration of the social,political and economic consequences. The failure to take into account the impact of extreme measures that have becomethe norm in many places in the Covid-19 pandemic has been stunning. Thedestruction of lives and livelihoods in the name of survival will haunt us fordecades.
How it all began
The coronavirus disease outbreak seems to have started in the Chinese city ofWuhan in December 2019. In January, the Chinese government put Wuhan andother major cities in the province under lockdown. A lockdown of 56 million people“is unprecedented in public health history, so it is certainly not a recommendationthe WHO has made,” Dr Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization’srepresentative in Beijing, emphasized at the time (Reuters 2020). In otherprovinces, the Chinese government implemented tailored measures, includingfactory shutdowns and school closures, but no national lockdown or restriction ofmovement to limit the spread of disease.Major media outlets in the United States called China’s locked-city strategydeployed in and around Wuhan “harsh,” “extreme,” “severe” and “controversial,”emphasizing that it offered “no guarantee of success” (Qin et al. 2020). A New York Times article noted that “China is trying to halt a coronavirus outbreak using atactic … with a long and complicated history fraught with social, political andethical concerns” (Levenson 2020). Experts quoted in the article called thelockdown of cities “an unbelievable undertaking” that would be “patentlyunconstitutional in the United States.” “That type of thing,” said James Hodge, aProfessor of Law, “is obviously an excessive response.” Another expert cited in thearticle, historian Howard Markel, pointed to the “darker side of quarantine – its useas a social tool rather than its scientific use as a medical tool.” In the UnitedKingdom, newspaper articles suggested that the Chinese government would not beable to keep the city of Wuhan “closed for business indefinitely” (Graham-Harrison2020).


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In February, the virus continued to circulate and soon appeared in other countries.In March, the WHO declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic. Despite thecriticism of China’s approach, a crude and extreme version of lockdown became theinternational norm promoted by experts, officials and the media across the world.Concerns with “the dark side of quarantine” faded rapidly.A few countries like South Korea veered from this norm and chose instead a classicinfectious disease intervention: test-trace-isolate, with a highly centralizedapproach to public health intelligence gathering. Emphasizing mass-testing andmeticulous contact tracing to interrupt the chain of transmission, South Koreanhealth officials closed schools and managed the crisis successfully without anylockdowns, roadblocks and few restrictions of movement. Significantly, SouthKorea learned from earlier outbreaks of infectious disease (SARS in particular), andimposed central control, used digital technologies, enforced quarantines andwitnessed one of the lowest Covid-19 mortality rates. By the end of April 2020,around 10,000 cases of infection had been detected, but only 240 people had died.Germany developed its own testing protocol, which was published on January 17
th
by the WHO (Beaumont 2020). When the first case was detected on January 28
th
,Germany launched mass-testing, systematic contact tracing and earlyhospitalization, keeping the mortality rate low and hospitals functional even whencases of infection increased (Mohr and Datan-Grajewski 2020). Health officialsrelied on an extensive network of laboratories and were able to conduct over500,000 SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) tests per week (Buck 2020). Along with SouthKorea, Germany put testing and contact tracing at the heart of the response.Despite the WHO’s emphasis on testing and South Korea’s and Germany’s earlysuccess in reducing the spread of the virus, most countries considered testing atscale as a low priority and relied on an extreme version of the Chinese approach oflockdown. However, in China, the approach was tailored and regionalized; as aWHO report noted, “specific containment measures were adjusted to the provincial,county and even community context, the capacity of the setting and the nature ofnovel coronavirus transmission there” (WHO 2020). The lockdown focused on themajor cities in the most affected province, constraining the life of 56 million peoplein a country of 1.4 billion. In other words, it was a limited lockdown affecting 4% ofChina’s total population. In contrast to the tailored and regionally differentiatedintervention that sought to minimize the socio-economic impact of the response,many other governments across the world imposed nationwide lockdowns thatwent far beyond China’s locked-city approach. In practice, these lockdownsamounted to curfews (often legalized after the fact by emergency laws).Italy was the world’s first country with a nationwide lockdown/curfew. Manycountries followed suit, partly motivated by shocking images of overwhelmedhospitals in Italy’s north and partly driven by a disease model report released in theUnited Kingdom a few days after Italy’s surprising national lockdownannouncement (Ferguson et al. 2020). This moment of shock and surprise triggereda chain reaction in the pandemic response. The horizon shifted, the inconceivablebecame possible, and life suddenly felt surreal. The UK’s disease model garnered a lot of attention, creating a sense of urgency thatamplified the political pressure because the numbers were alarming (Ferguson2020). Published without peer-review on an institutional website, the reportcompared Covid-19 with the great pandemic of 1918, which killed over 50 millionpeople worldwide and suggested, without any evidence, that SARS-CoV-2 was “a