This is for the Dilbert fan following this thread (hi Hugh ):
To which Sundance responds:
quote:
Comrade Adams is not happy with non-compliant citizens refusing to adjust their wrongful thinking to benefit the needs of our new state. During these stressful times, thought, without regard for collective need, is an indication a citizen may be a subversive. Please report subversives to the Ministry of COVID Compliance, so they may be blocked from the benefits of the new union; and encouraged with enhanced support.
If wrong-thoughts continue to be expressed, it may become necessary for the Ministry to deduct 200 credits from your social compliance score. Please do not put the Ministry in the position of having to make such decisions. Compliance is in your best interest.
State influence agent, Comrade Adams, helps to correct wrong-thinking. The state will never force you to share your health records. Only if you wish to remove yourself from voluntary home confinement, access rights, and unlock your social privileges, will you be encouraged to join a health registry via your voluntary cell phone/transponder provider.
The Ministry would never force your compliance comrade. You may choose to remain external to the Federated United State System (FUSS). You may also choose not to participate in the employment network, state services, access to civil transit, large entertainment gatherings, parks and restaurants. Nothing is mandated. Relax comrades, the Ministry is sensitive to your previous rights as we initiate our new, safer, society.
The COVID Compliance Ministry appreciates good citizens who voluntarily participate in the registry. We reward good citizenship status with enhanced credits allowing access to a safe COVID Compliant Society. A safer society; where the odds will always be in your favor.
Would it not be preferable in the new regime to have an alert on your phone warning you of your proximity to a non-compliant, possibly infected, citizen?
A rogue citizen could put a compliant society at risk of infection. They may not just carry biologics they could carry a more alarming virus of wrong-thought against the interests of the state. Rogue citizens would be subversive to our new society.
Surely all good citizens would agree with Comrade Adams; there must be an emergency alert of some form identifying the larger audience to these subversive public enemies so we could respond accordingly. The infrastructure is already established. Society is familiar with “Amber Alerts”, this would be a slight modification to avoid viral spread.
Relax, it’s going to be lots of fun Comrades. Perhaps we just start with digital armbands, certifications within your portable transponder unit, to compliment our mandatory face masks. Each state could create their designated digital stamps for your COVID ID.
Traveling will be so much fun, we can collect the whole set. “Achtung Juden – New York”, “Juden Raus – California”, and the larger federal “Enemy of the People”, designation.
Social Distancing or House Arrest…. Details, comrades,… details.
"We now know the healthcare system is not going to be overloaded. State by state this is now obviously true. Even in hotspots like New York and Louisiana the hospitals aren’t full, and they never were in any actual danger of exceeding capacity."
Ferris- the key word is Adams’ statement above is “voluntarily”.
His response to that piece was this:
(Edit- see new post below)
Scott’s throwing out a lot of ideas on how we could safely end the lockdown ASAP. Most things he posts are not serious proposals. He’s looking for well thought out responses to these ideas, pro or con. Saying “I’d NEVER give my personal information to the government” when you’ve already given them similar information hundreds of times is not a well thought out response. No doubt there are many legitimate objections to such an idea, but a blanket statement like that is not one.
I'm operating on the willingness that reasonable requests from my despised Governor will be considered on a case by case basis, and I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Civil Liberty Violations on a Temporary, rational time frame.
As long as I or We don't decide I or We have to fulfill my/our Oath(s) and fertilize the Tree of Liberty in the traditional manner, I'm happy. Life will briefly suck for more than one person if despotic impulses can't be controlled over time.
I will say that the Emperor of New York has, aside from political yelling, done fairly well in the balancing of the Needs of the Many and the Rights of the Individual. No State Wide Lockdowns enforced by Gestapo like arrests in the parks, for example.
He's already way past thin ice on Rights in other contexts, but Pooh's Breath over reaction has been limited to partisan complaining, and that's his right. ( since you can't execute politicians for lying, legally, by tradition )
I do hate to praise a Cuomo, but fair is fair.
I doubt I'll sign up for an app to maintain distancing from infected. I'm a bit of a luddite with phone tech. I Have loaded Zoom conferencing software for household distributed breakfasts & medical appointments. ( note that at least one member of such conference calls must buy the app to act as server initiator )
BTW. If you have a PC with a decent video system, you can green screen your background and substitute what you like in place of the sink full of dirty dishes.
One of my Household members in calls appears to be in a video game ( not sure which one ) sitting in a tavern in front of a busy village square with folk riding tigers and flaming ponies by. Elves and Orcs? ( I'm sworn off MMORPGs ) Don't know how you do that with just a phone though.
Coronavirus: China’s devious move under cover of virus While the world’s attention is focused on the devastating coronavirus crisis, China is executing an aggressive plan to seize control of a key region.
I don't think we are hiding deaths like CCP. I think we have been hiding our heads in the sand as far as Flu deaths for years. I'm not sure it wasn't an instilled fear in the medical community in China that resulted in the willingness of doctors to not report deaths. I believe a lot of chinese were killed in their homes by the system's approach there.
I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Civil Liberty Violations on a Temporary, rational time frame. I am not, and it is being logged in manifestos across the land.
The power-hungry are getting a taste of totalitarian control with this, and it will be extremely difficult to pry it away from them at ALL, much less in a 'timely manner'.
I've said it before - this is Socialism Without An Election.
I *think* he's on the right side of things (I tried to listen to him once, probably a video link you posted up on this thread, but abandoned ship less than a minute in. I'm definitely not his target market).
How do you kill someone with a piece of paper? A thousand cuts, one at a time.
How a Premier U.S. Drug Company Became a Virus ‘Super Spreader’ Biogen employees unwittingly spread the coronavirus from Massachusetts to Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Gee...looks like SoKo has it licked. Funny, that...global testing, dealing with people who actually have the disease but aren't showing any symptoms...instead of only testing people who have symptoms, thus...well...pretty much wasting the limited number of test kits available.
I say again - if we (humans - not Americans, not Italians, but HUMANS) want to lick this, we need to test every soul on the planet, ESPECIALLY the asymptomatic. That should be the FIRST priority.
I guarantee there are more carriers out there than ANYONE suspects...and if you're carrying, you're spreading. It may not make YOU sick, but what about the people you have contact with??
Remind me again why we only test people with symptoms?
SK didn't do global testing. It was targeted testing, largely based on contact tracing. Global testing for the virus is a fools errand. A person who has just fought the virus off will test negative. A person who is infected, but still in the incubation period will also test negative. It tells you nothing. Antibody testing can tell you who has had it in the past, but is just now getting rolled out in the US. Antibody testing does pretty much nothing for you when you are trying to control it in the early part of the epidemic anyway. You NEED to test for the active virus to identify the infected, and then smart testing based on contact tracing. Random testing just wastes resources, and is not what SK did. Beyond that, SK locked down the population in ways that would never fly in the US. They did so early too, before it became an unmanageable problem. Sadly, the politics in the US would never allow that to happen. Instead, we are left to react only when it has become obvious that the train is going to derail on the bend ahead regardless of what you do. You've already complained about the restrictions put on US citizens. I think you would have gone ballistic had you been subjected to SK rules.
SK still hasn't figured out how to lift the restrictions. They did a great job at snuffing it in their country. They still have no herd immunity though. They have no vaccine. They have no proven preventative medications. As soon as they lift the restrictions, they will be starting over again.
Again, you have to balance 1) The need to allow the economy to run freely 2) The need to prevent transmission of the virus 3) The need to prevent the health care system from being overrun. It's a balance that people will not agree on, even after the fact.
A person who has just fought the virus off will test negative. A person who is infected, but still in the incubation period will also test negative.
Do you not realize by your description that would make testing all but useless? According to your theory any testing that didn't hit the "sweet spot" would show a false negative.
A study out of Japan underscores the number of COVID-19 carriers who show no symptoms. One focused on the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was placed under quarantine in Japan in early February 2020 when it was discovered a former passenger tested positive for the virus.
That study found that 634 out of 3,063 tests administered to quarantined passengers came back positive. It is estimated that about 17.9% of those positive patients showed no symptoms.
As you might imagine, it's hard to figure out when someone has a disease but shows no signs of it.
Some cases of asymptomatic carriers have been confirmed by finding and testing people who were in close contact with COVID-19 patients. For those who tested positive without symptoms, follow-up exams confirmed that about 25% continued to show no signs
At a nursing home in King County, Washington, about a third of its 82 residents tested positive for the coronavirus in mid-March. Half of those were free of fever, malaise and coughing when they were swabbed for the virus
Read that whole article. The whole thing is relevent.
“Early results from deCode Genetics indicate that a low proportion of the general population has contracted the virus and that about half of those who tested positive are non-symptomatic,”
Who needs educating?
It makes absolutely zero clinical sense to say that a person carrying a disease, does not test positive for that disease, simply because they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. None.
You do need enough virus bodies in the blood or saliva, or mucus to exceed a minimum to test positive. No test can detect just one.
Blood sample or throat or nose swab are the 3 common sampling techniques. We don't take the entire body, liquify it, and pass it through a filter to just get the 70 odd pounds of viruses separated, then test each one with electron microscope survey and tiny tweezers.
You assume if it's wandering around in the blood it's in the snot as well. For most viruses that's true. Some do confine themselves to one type of cell, ( nerves, eyes, ) but unlike a previous comment on this thread, you don't usually have any virus only in lung or other differentiated cells.
So there's a threshold below which the virus isn't detected, and that's a higher, later, level than needed to pass it on to others.
So you can test negative, have no obvious symptoms, and still infect dozens an hour.
There's a REASON I watch these charts and statements with skepticism. I KNOW the numbers are incomplete information, are inaccurate, and in cases like China ( and thus the total world numbers ) are deliberate lies.
The error bars, the uncertainty, are bigger than some predictions on the total number.
It makes absolutely zero clinical sense to say that a person carrying a disease, does not test positive for that disease, simply because they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. None.
I just described how the test works. They swab your nasal passages, trying to get a sample that will have the virus on it. They test that sample. It either detects the virus or it doesn't.
Once a person is infected, it takes time to incubate in that person. During this time, there simply isn't enough virus to be detected by the testing. Once they have fought the virus off, they no longer have the virus in them. Both will test negative. It's only after the incubation period, and prior to kicking it that you will get a positive test. It's pretty simple stuff.
I have no idea why you are ranting about people who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic testing negative. The test has NOTHING to do with symptoms. I never said it did.
I have no idea why you are ranting about people who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic testing negative. The test has NOTHING to do with symptoms. I never said it did.
Do you read your own posts?
A person who has just fought the virus off will test negative. A person who is infected, but still in the incubation period will also test negative.
"Incubation period" = asymptomatic/presymptomatic. I won't bother posting quotes, because that is a given with this virus.