Coronavirus: what Canadians need to know

earthquakefish wrote:

And Quebec's mandate, while social workers decry not having room for homeless people, the Premier has the cognitive dissonance to say,  I believe there is enough shelters. Wouldn't those shelters, spread the severly contagious disease, and unlike many don't have means to seek shelter, isolation, in other avenues?  Which could actually stem infection?

Here in Winnipeg, homeless shelters have had to reduce capacity for people, along with drop-ins. That has turned city bus shelters downtown into defacto drop-ins and shelter beds for the night. Thank God Winnipeg hasn't experienced the harsh temperatures that it would be expected to at this time of year, otherwise people would be literally freezing to death in the streets.

Ontario emergency ward nurse: "please stay home"; CTV News

"please stay home"

https://www.thedailybeast.com/coffey-county-kansas-nurses-refuse-to-give...

Shit happens, and I'm sure no one did anything intentionally to create a pandemic, but certainly worth checking out.

Trump has stuck his nose into it trying to turn it into a racist issue which of course is extremely unfortunate. 

Whatever they eventually discover about Covid-19 origins, as MM has said, everybody on our planet should be given access to the vaccine. 

INVESTIGATIONS JAN. 4, 2021

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

By Nicholson Baker

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

I. 

Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Where Did It Come From? This chart measures the genetic similarity of known viruses to the novel coronavirus (which appears in yellow). By far the closest is the bat virus RaTG13, which appears in blue, and which was recovered in 2013 and brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The first SARS, marked in red, is a much more distant relative. Graphic: Zhou, P., Yang, XL., Wang, XG. et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 579, 270–273 (2020)

“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.

---------

For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.

This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

"Theories" like that are dangerous. Sure it's possible. It's also possible that it originated in the US. 

AChinese official who has a history of attacking the United States online has lent a voice to a conspiracy

theory that blames American soldiers for bringing COVID-19 to China, though the science does not support that narrative.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/chinese-officials-blame-us-ar...

It didn't take a lab to produce the bubonic plague.

NorthReport wrote:

This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

You have sunk to a new low in circulating fake news. But since it comes from an approved US imperial source you think you can publish the whole piece on this board and risk Rabble's reputation.

To add insult to injury, so many news stories are applauding Israel for their effective COVID-19 vaccination roll-out. It is extremely disrespectful and disgusting to fail to mention the continued denial of life and death care to Palestinians including the vaccines.

What has Canada actually done to help countries like Haiti, the Philippines, etc with their covid-19 battles?

Excellent and timely article by Chelsea Nash. 

Front-line worker: A comprehensive definition

https://rabble.ca/news/2021/01/front-line-worker-comprehensive-definition

How to Talk to Coronavirus Skeptics

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-talk-to-coronavirus-skeptics

The lab leak theory and the twisted, messy hunt for COVID-19's origin

A tangle of conspiracy and politicking has complicated the investigation into the origins of the pandemic.

https://www.cnet.com/features/the-lab-leak-theory-and-the-twisted-messy-...

There has been antibodies found in people from early as March 2019, in Florida.  Either those antibododies are conclusive of how the antibodies produced are similar to the common cold (also a coronavirus), or this went on long before our hyper vigiliance and tyrannical reporting.

NorthReport wrote:

Controversially, Daszak has been included among a team of experts from the WHO that has finally been allowed by Beijing to investigate the origin of the outbreak of COVID-19, over a year after it started

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4104828

 

Face masks

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/22/health/face-mask-n95-coronavirus-transmis...

Dr Birx's interview on Face the Nation today worth watching