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Post by prairiegardens on Mar 25, 2020 14:47:58 GMT -5
The doctors, nurses and other health care workers are not immune to getting it, even if rigorously tending to all the known methods of avoiding doing so. The hospitals don't have nearly enough beds available. It's going to be a very bumpy ride, more so, I think for those of you in the US even though it seems as though the Republicans are finally digging in their heels a bit about trying to force everyone back to work by Easter.
Nobody even knows if a person actually gets immunity if they get it and recover.
In the meantime, nobody at all appears to be considering what the Chinese did to stop it, everyone is looking to big Pharma to create a vaccine...and the FDA is supposedly presently allowing testing for possible treatment drugs without the normal controls and so forth, so imho more people are going to die from that, it's like throwing stuff on a housefire and hoping it will put it out somehow, but nobody knows if it will or if it will make it burn faster. Or maybe start another fire elsewhere. And of course, the Pharma companies aren't accountable or responsible for whatever happens so they are tossing all sorts of drugs into the battle..most of them expensive as far as I can see. They are supposedly also doing transfusions of blood from people who have recovered and putting it into people who are dying, or so I am led to understand. Not verified.
Meanwhile the Chinese are running research projects using VitaminC, the first studies using massive doses (related to body weight)of intravenous VitaminC and now they have extended that to oral VitaminC as a possible way if not to prevent, at least to moderate the severity, as vitaminC is difficult to take in high doses orally, the body just excretes it. Apparently they are having some success, but I don't read Chinese so don't know precisely if the news report translation was accurate or not and now the arbiters of what shall be allowed on the internet have taken it down..it was apparently a news release from a medical association in Shanghai... another report was from a Doctor running a similar research project from a hospital in Wuhan.
This to me is a very scary precedent, as people who believe that drinking water will prevent it will find out for themselves how well that works (that was named as a thing going around the internet although I haven't seen that one) and other than giving them false hope doesn't do any harm. Preventing possible other solutions in the name of "fake news" -such editing being done by non medical personel - strikes me as a frightening example of censorship far far too easilly managed by people possibly with a personal stake in the discussion.
The Chinese have too long a history of traditional medicines to automatically rely entirely on human ingenuity to come up with something when something simple and readilly available may do the job. Our hubris of believing that no matter what the arena we can best nature is, I think, showing up exactly how without validity that belief is.
I saw a bittersweet clip on FB the other day, someone explaining to Mother Nature how we couldn't possibly shut down economies and disrupt lives to address climate change. Mother Nature replied.. "Here's a virus. Practice."
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Post by steev on Mar 25, 2020 17:50:52 GMT -5
To save money, the MISadministration shut down the Pandemic bureau, which was created to deal with this sort of stuff.
Even more wonderfully thrifty, they shut down a liaisson between the CDC and their equivalent in China; had we still had that presence there, we might have gotten wind of Covid-19 as early as last July.
Luckily, these two budgetary moves will make it easier to afford the two trillion we'll go into debt to battle the effects of Covid-19; oh, wait, we gave that money to the wealthy in a tax cut.
Is it not somewhere in the Bible that Armageddon will be announced by a Trump? I think I hear it/him blowing hard right now! Feh!
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Post by prairiegardens on Mar 25, 2020 22:02:45 GMT -5
Saving money isn't Trump's forte, apparently the deficit is already 25% higher than at this time last year and that was over a trillion dollars when the dust settled. I was looking at the US debt clock today and it is quite astonishing www.usdebtclock.org/It's amazing how the US gets away with just piling debt on debt...no ordinary citizen is allowed to go beyond their capacity to pay for their own enterprises, but the Feds have already gone to the point of each taxpayer on the hook for $190,528 not counting their own personal debt. And... there's no sign of that ever going down, in fact the opposite is true, it's just getting bigger and bigger. And, this projection was made BEFORE Covid19 came on the scene. Is the country going for the "too big to fail" scenario, which of course didn't work for Greece, or Iceland, which latter simply said, "oh well, sucks to be you, we aren't paying because we don't have the money. Sorry about that, have some fermented shark? " Or so I understand. I suppose that's what you get when you have your monetary policies organized by a guy who has declared bankruptcy five times. ( Although he is still in no danger of landing on the streets, as so many have.)But nobody seems to be paying any attention at all.Today I ran across three people defending his "tax cuts" ("well, I think I got a little money out of them")
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Post by steev on Mar 25, 2020 22:17:24 GMT -5
I think he regards the deficit the same way he regards climate change: "I won't be here to worry about it". Fuck your kids; fuck my kids; all that matters is that I am a big deal; unfortunately, even his own kids don't get how indifferent he is to them, so long as they, too, are on the gravy train.
As for the debt, just run the fiat money presses; value is no longer relevant, only how fast the "money" circulates.
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Post by flowerbug on Mar 25, 2020 22:20:52 GMT -5
i posted on Jan 18th that they needed to shut down flights and that this was gonna cost billions. i guess i was wrong about the cost... i think the cat was already out of the bag by then, but that was when i first heard much about it and it seemed obvious to me that they should err on the side of caution until they learn more about a virus before it gets out of hand.
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Post by steev on Mar 25, 2020 22:36:37 GMT -5
'scuse me; "err on the side of caution"?, when the President denies there is a problem and the Veep thinks it's the Will of God? WTF do scientists and doctors know? Can't we just "believe" our way through this? That worked for the Black Death, didn't it? Oh, wait, that killed one third of the population in Europe, but I rant. I really shouldn't get testy when authorities are spewing shit while people die, so discourteous to my "betters".
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Post by prairiegardens on Mar 25, 2020 23:18:31 GMT -5
well the food distribution system atm seems to be working BUT>. it's very very early days. Up here in Canada, many if not all farmers markets are closed because of the social isolation thing, that clearly will be worked around as time goes by, a lot of the growers are just starting to plant for the summer markets. Other than that, your guess is likely at least as good as mine. I'm suggesting to everyone I know that they'd better grow a garden, and I'm gazing unhappilly at plans for large solar dehydrators.
Even the "international" aisles have been cleared of lentils and dry beans of all sorts and the countries they are coming from have their own issues with the virus.
I am nurturing the feeble hope that common sense may get a toehold in the door of "food security" meaning that we don't rely on getting all our fresh stuff from Mexico and Chile and South Africa (and the US) but start supporting out own growers instead of sacrificing them on the alter of international trade agreements.
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Post by xdrix on Mar 26, 2020 2:35:34 GMT -5
The Mexico product his corn without pesticid. And he sell his corn at even price than the corn with pesticid of united states.
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Post by reed on Mar 26, 2020 3:06:09 GMT -5
I'm not at all confident food distribution will remain intact in the US. The infrastructure for it exists but it takes intelligent leadership to keep it organized and operating and we don't have that. Then there is the unfortunate consequence of immediate increase in extreme weather caused by loss of the shading effect of pollution. Basically the smoke falls out in a few days, the CO2 remains.
Everything has been on thin ice for a long time, we all know that. The "government" knows that. A report to congress way back in the 1990s detailed how it all might come down and described a number of triggers that might do it. Pandemic was one of those triggers and it has been pulled but the others are also still active as well. Civil disorder, extreme weather events with industrial crop failure, wide spread long term power failure, uncontrolled wild fire, war, economic conditions dwarfing the great depression, everything is on the table.
Sorry to be so bleak but I'm not all certain there is another end of this tunnel, if so it will be along time till we see a light at it.
On a lighter note I had a lot of mustard and turnips survive through this year and they have really took off, a few are bolting, the flower stems are so delicious, looks like there will be lots of them this year and plenty to leave for seed, I enjoy grazing as I get beds ready to plant. Without the jet trails the sky is clear and blue. The peach trees are in full bloom and there are some bees on them this year, pears are just starting. Birds are singing like crazy, I don't recognize some of them, new residents I suppose.
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Post by steev on Mar 26, 2020 13:29:08 GMT -5
I just sent my Rep Barbara Lee the suggestion that cruise ships shouldn't get a handout; they should be hired as hospitals for the uninfected, freeing up space for Covid victims.
Perhaps you should pass this idea on to your Reps.
I'm sure the Pres will allow his hotel space to be used so also (gratis, of course, as a humanitarian gesture, he being so concerned about people's lives and welfare; I also expect the Sun to rise from the West).
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Post by flowerbug on Mar 26, 2020 14:20:40 GMT -5
i wish common sense had been elected, but our system is far too corrupt for that and the citizens are responsible for allowing it to continue. that's about all i can say on that topic.
as far as food production goes, last year my area had so much rains that a lot of farmers could not plant. the lands around me were basically ignored or planted as cover crops but nothing was harvested from them (and the cover crops didn't do that well either).
my own gardens did pretty well. so when people argue with me about how organic gardening and adopting permaculture techniques can't possibly feed the world i just smile and say that i know the difference and then get back to work.
in the meantime i think the USoA still likely has a nice glut of dairy and cheese to work off along with some other glaring rediculous amounts of processed stuff that we call food (i don't, it's gross and i prefer not to even eat it if i can). i don't think this pandemic was a conspiracy of the Cheese Board.
all told i suspect things will be ok in the end, but it's bumpy ride to get through this until then. the sooner a vaccine the better.
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Post by prairiegardens on Mar 26, 2020 22:03:45 GMT -5
Just got told that farmers markets have been designated "essential services" so hurrah for a glimmer of common sense.
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Post by steev on Mar 26, 2020 22:50:21 GMT -5
Damn right! People need to be able to get good food in difficult times and the producers thereof need to be able to market their produce.
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Post by 12540dumont on Mar 27, 2020 13:13:40 GMT -5
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1So, now it looks like a cold. Not fake news but from work funded by Germany... With so many heads of state sick, and isolating, how come our fearless leader is immune? And so is Boris Badenov and Natasha. Those Russians have amazing immunity. Just ask my cat, Katia Kalashnikov...she's immune to anything except the supper bell ringing late. She's a Russian Blue. So, any of you notice all the expensive store putting up plywood to prevent looting. So, lockdown, followed by martial law. I'm seeing a pattern here that I do not like.
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Post by steev on Mar 27, 2020 22:04:29 GMT -5
Did I fail to point out that I'd not cozy up to him, nor would I disparage her doing so, despite her clearly selling herself, so sad; not that I'm saying she's a nice person, which she's made it clear she's not; she made her bed; she can lie on it.
I wouldn't want to associate with that POS, even if I were a virus. Pretty remarkable that a virus can realize where it doesn't want to join but 30-some % of Americans can't. However stupid you think the average populace is, 50% is dumber than that. Do your best to be self-sufficient; hardly nobody else is gonna look out for you. Of course, I don't count those who have good community relations; that's how we survive, on the smarts of those not dumb-shits. Damn, it's amazing we survived at all. Will we continue?
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