Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

[SunriseChampion]

Yesterday was rain. Having done every conceivable indoor chore humanly possible, I photographed the inside of the house and contents for insurance purposes. Not hyper detailed, just enough to keep us thinking should we ever have a catastrophic loss. On the computer and SD card in the safety deposit box. How boring is that!

This is what it's come to!

If you get bored, just start going into super detail. Catalogue every single spoon. Record. Pillow case. Shoe. Piece of hardware on every single cabinet.

 

[SunriseChampion]

She was swift and decisive..............did far better on the LTC issue...............but also told people to get outside.

Apparently, from something I read in today's Globe and Mail (which included a special puzzle section today!!!!), British Columbia's LTC homes have a much higher proportion of single occupancy rooms in relation to Ontario which is what helped with the situation there to a large degree.

 

[Northern Light]

Apparently, from something I read in today's Globe and Mail (which included a special puzzle section today!!!!), British Columbia's LTC homes have a much higher proportion of single occupancy rooms in relation to Ontario which is what helped with the situation there to a large degree.

Definitely fewer 'ward beds' (3 or 4 to a room) and yes that definitely helps.

But she moved to ban workers in LTCs working at multiple homes weeks before this was done in Ontario.

She also initiated the nationalization of all LTC staff in BC (the homes are still private, per se, where applicable, but BC manages staffing). Again, she did this very early.

So she was on top of the situation and recognized the risk.

Doubtless because BC had a bad LTC outbreak early on; and Washington across the border had one too.

But why we didn't act on the exact same evidence remains a mystery.

 

[SunriseChampion]

Yeah, true word.

We've deffo failed our elders. It's pretty disgraceful.

But, camping ban....you know, to make up for that fact, or something.

Then again, LTC was a disgrace before the plague hit. This has just proven that point really poignantly. As a Euro, I've never really understood this LTC thing. All my granparents died in their own homes....well, one is still kicking but in his own home and he's like 94 now or whatever ancient "I saw WWII" age. Lives by himself because grams died a couple of years ago...on the second floor of a triplex. Still drove to his country home until four years ago.

I'm not sure about this LTC business....especially if we're going to underpay workers there and just like "out of sight, out of mind" all the elders involved.

It's disgusting. The whole thing.

 

[AlbertC]

Health Canada approves first clinical trial for possible coronavirus vaccine

May 16, 2020

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the first Canadian clinical trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine have been approved by Health Canada, and will be conducted out of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University.

Speaking from Rideau Cottage on Saturday, he said the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) will be working with the drug’s manufacturers in order to produce and distribute the vaccine “here at home” — if the trials are successful.

Health Canada approves first clinical trial for possible coronavirus vaccine | Globalnews.ca

The vaccine trials were being conducted out of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University.

globalnews.ca

 

[PinkLucy]

Not sure the fire ban is a real thing as Carling Township had a sign outside a municipal facility that said only campfires were allowed. Saw pleeeeenty of fires being burnt down, all over the place....so.....I don't think the fire ban is a thing

The fire ban was lifted. https://news.ontario.ca/mnr/en/2020/05/ontario-ready-to-respond-to-wildland-fire-season.html

 

[PinkLucy]

Hamilton nursing home experiences an outbreak and evacuates.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/rosslyn-public-health-orders-1.5572720

 

[AlbertC]

After the coronavirus pandemic, group fitness will never be the same

The reasons people love group fitness are the same reasons that make going back so hard.

May 17, 2020

After the coronavirus pandemic, group fitness will never be the same

The reasons people love group fitness are the same reasons that make going back so hard.

www.vox.com

 

[tiffer24]

He's become known as the pastor who preached that devout Christians could not get the coronavirus, then he got it himself.

Now David Lah, a Canadian who has been in Myanmar since at least February, is facing jail time for holding public sermons in defiance of government restrictions on large events in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19.

In one video posted in late March, Lah tells worshippers, "If you hear the sermon of God, the virus will never come to you; I declare it with the soul of Jesus Christ."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canad...-covid-19-restriction-on-gatherings-1.5570044

 

[Northern Light]

After the coronavirus pandemic, group fitness will never be the same

The reasons people love group fitness are the same reasons that make going back so hard.

May 17, 2020

After the coronavirus pandemic, group fitness will never be the same

The reasons people love group fitness are the same reasons that make going back so hard.

www.vox.com

I do wish the 'never be the same' types would go away.

The reality is humanity has had many large-scale (and myriad smaller scale) pandemics and epidemics; along with financial crises and wars...........

Forever people mutter on ........will never be the same..............war to end all wars..........no more stupid loans............no more excess greed.............uh huh.

Really, we might all agree there should be lasting change in some areas........Long-Term-Care would top my list, followed by housing/shelters and less crowded transit...........

We'll be lucky to see any of these properly addressed in a lasting way.

As for social gatherings and group activities..........it will be 95% back to the way it was in 24 months, even without a vaccine. Whether it should be or not.

Rock concerts will happen again, fans will attend sporting events; and people will go to fitness classes.

***

Sorry for ranting........but when I see this sort of thing, it offends me not merely for its lack of accuracy or ignorance of history, but because its a distraction from the change we should make;
and we will all need to fight to make happen.

 

[PinkLucy]

Interesting article on how the virus differs in children vs adults. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/covid-19-kids/611728

 

[SunriseChampion]

The fire ban was lifted. https://news.ontario.ca/mnr/en/2020/05/ontario-ready-to-respond-to-wildland-fire-season.html

Excellent!!!! !

 

[SunriseChampion]

I do wish the 'never be the same' types would go away.

Honestly, what a stupid, fatalistic, nihilistic way to be.

The reality is humanity has had many large-scale (and myriad smaller scale) pandemics and epidemics; along with financial crises and wars...........

Forever people mutter on ........will never be the same..............war to end all wars..........no more stupid loans............no more excess greed.............uh huh.

Yeah, remember "Never Again"? Oh, wait......the Uyghur would like to have a word.
Or, for another example, see slavery in the Arab world. Yes, in 2020.

As for social gatherings and group activities..........it will be 95% back to the way it was in 24 months, even without a vaccine. Whether it should be or not.

Trust me, we've been patient this whole time but us hedonistic degens will go back to making love and kissing each other upon greeting as soon as we start getting together again....so, within like a month...or whenever we are encouraged to socialise again.

And our social gatherings will never die forever.

Punk's not dead. Rave's not dead. Football's not dead.

Life moves on. As it should.

Sharing a cup of wine at a music festival with a complete stranger will still happen as soon as we're in that setting again.

 

[SunriseChampion]

He's become known as the pastor who preached that devout Christians could not get the coronavirus, then he got it himself.

Now David Lah, a Canadian who has been in Myanmar since at least February, is facing jail time for holding public sermons in defiance of government restrictions on large events in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19.

In one video posted in late March, Lah tells worshippers, "If you hear the sermon of God, the virus will never come to you; I declare it with the soul of Jesus Christ."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canad...-covid-19-restriction-on-gatherings-1.5570044

This is like that ideeeeot in the US who was blowing the virus away. These preachers are severely mentally afflicted....even if they're just putting on a show.

 

[W. K. Lis]

How France Lost the Weapons to Fight a Pandemic
The French once thought of medical gear, like fighter jets, as a national security asset that had to be made at home. But cuts and outsourcing have left them scrambling for masks, tests and even pain pills.

From link.

When President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly declared “war” on the coronavirus in March, he solemnly promised that France would support “front-line” health workers with “the means, the protection.”

The reality was that France was nearly defenseless.

The government’s flip-flopping policies on past pandemics had left a once formidable national stockpile of face masks nearly depleted. Officials had also outsourced the manufacturing capacity to replenish that stockpile to suppliers overseas, despite warnings since the early 2000s about the rising risks of global pandemics.

That has left France — unlike Germany, its rival for European leadership — dependent on foreign factories and painfully unable to ramp up domestic production of face masks, test kits, ventilators and even the thermometers and over-the-counter fever-reducing medicines to soothe the sick.

Today, as it has begun loosening one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, France has become a case study in how some countries are now reconsidering their dependence on global supply chains built during the past two decades on the mantra of low costs and quick delivery. Even now, France has no guarantees that it can secure enough supplies in the coming weeks to protect against a potential second wave of the virus.

“In times of crisis, we can no longer switch from one production zone to another to get our essential products,” Louis Gautier, the former director of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, a powerful inter-ministerial unit inside the prime minister’s office that coordinates the response to large-scale crises, said in an interview. “The issue of strategic stocks and secure supplies has to be reconsidered. A new model has to be invented.”

France had long identified masks as indispensable in a pandemic, yet the government had mostly stopped stockpiling them during the past decade, mainly for budgetary reasons. Domestic production collapsed at the same time the country’s pharmaceutical industry was also moving overseas.

France had decided “that it was no longer necessary to keep massive stocks in the country, considering that production plants were able to be operational very quickly, especially in China,” the health minister, Olivier Véran, said in Parliament in March.

But the scope and speed of the coronavirus defied that logic. Still reeling from its own outbreak, China, the world’s leading maker of masks, was overwhelmed with orders. India, a top exporter of medication, temporarily banned exports for fear of shortages.

As the globalized supply chain broke down, French health officials lost critical time as the national government — as well as cities, towns and even wards — scrambled to buy supplies directly from China and elsewhere. The government organized highly publicized airlifts of masks from China, betraying both its desperation and its dependence.

France has suffered more than 27,000 deaths and one of the world’s highest fatality rates, 60 percent greater than in the United States.
“We will have to rebuild France’s agricultural, health, industrial and technological independence,” Mr. Macron said in a recent address.

To many critics, France’s defenselessness in face of the virus was the logical conclusion of the hollowing out of France’s manufacturing base — a transformation that has deepened inequality and fueled violent protests, like the Yellow Vest movement.

In the early 2000s, Germany had a slight edge over France in manufacturing and exporting PCR test kits — the most widely used today to detect the virus — and oxygen therapy equipment, according to United Nations data. But by 2018, Germany had a $1.4 billion trade surplus for PCR test kits, whereas France had a deficit of $89 million.

While Germany was able to mobilize its industry quickly to fight the pandemic, France was paralyzed. It couldn’t carry out large-scale testing because it lacked cotton swabs and reagents, low-value but crucial elements that had been outsourced to Asia.

“France has deindustrialized too much since the 2000s; it’s paying for it today,” said Philippe Aghion, an economist who teaches at Harvard and Collège de France.

In a still unpublished study, Mr. Aghion and economists at the Free University of Brussels found that over all, countries with the capacity to manufacture test kits and related instruments, like Germany and Austria, had so far suffered fewer deaths during the pandemic.

In France, shortages have affected even basic goods. Drugstores ran out of thermometers. Supplies of paracetamol — a common pain reliever sold as Tylenol in the United States — became so dangerously low that the authorities restricted its sale.

The last European factory producing the medication was in France, near the city of Lyon, but it closed in 2008, according to France’s National Academy of Pharmacy. The association has long warned of a growing dependence on foreign drugmakers, noting that 60 to 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients in Europe are imported — compared with 20 percent three decades ago.

“Nothing has been done at the government level to stop this,” said Marie-Christine Belleville, a member of the academy.
Warnings, in fact, had been issued for years.

In the aftermath of the SARS pandemic in Asia in 2003, French officials analyzed the risks in a series of reports and built up a national stockpile of masks and other protective equipment manufactured by domestic suppliers — in keeping with a Gaullist tradition of maintaining a strong domestic defense industry that also exports Rafale fighter jets, submarines, minesweepers and frigates to the world.

In 2006, a government pandemic plan recommended a series of measures, including creating stockpiles of masks. A year earlier, France’s Health Ministry signed a five-year contract to buy 180 million masks a year that Bacou-Dalloz, then the biggest mask maker in France, would produce at a factory in Plaintel, about 280 miles from Paris.

Details from the contract, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, reveal the government’s strategic thinking at the time. Securing a domestic supplier would help France avoid being “exclusively dependent on importations that would be disrupted in the context of a pandemic.”

The contract would ensure the government’s “renewal of its stockpile of masks” as older stocks reached their expiration dates. And during a pandemic, the government could requisition the plant’s production.

The government order “monopolized the Plaintel factory’s entire production capacity,” said Jean-Jacques Fuan, a former director of the plant.
By 2008, the government issued a white paper that for the first time cited pandemics as a potential national threat, ranking it fourth behind terrorism, cyberwarfare and a ballistic missile attack.

“In the next 15 years, the arrival of a pandemic is possible,” the paper warned. It could be highly contagious and lethal, it said, and could come and go in waves for weeks or months.

But soon afterward, many politicians began criticizing the policy of stockpiling masks and medication as wasteful. About 383 million euros spent in 2009 on acquiring 44 million vaccinations against the H1N1 flu caused a political scandal after less than 9 percent of French people were vaccinated.

In 2013, the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security issued new pandemic directives emphasizing “overall savings” and reducing the importance of maintaining a stockpile. Surgical masks would be stocked, but not the more sophisticated FFP2 masks that, the report noted, cost 10 times as much.