Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Syt]

What's up with the Israeli flag?

Not sure about that one, but some protesors like to wear yellow stars of david labelled "not vaccinated".

Meanwhile, in Vienna:

[Syt]

Message from the Israeli community Vienna:

[Syt]

There seem to be less people in Vienna this weekend than 2 weeks ago (about 1k vs 10-20k), but it's significantly colder than two weeks ago. Not looking forward to next week Saturday when it's likely to be a very mild spring day.

[Syt]

Correction: the demonstrators today are protesting in several clumps throughout the inner districts.

At the same time there's an anti-racism demonstration this afternoon; let's hope they don't intersect.

[Iormlund]

Meanwhile, in Kassel, Germany.

Wonder how many of my former coworkers are there.

[Sheilbh]

Anti-lockdown demonstrations in London today too. I had to go into town today and saw one poster for it with the slogan "We survived Spanish Flu without surveillance. NO VACCINE PASSPORTS." Which I don't feel is a great call to action

Gillian McKeith is, inevitably, attending and posting photos:

[DGuller]

Wonder how many of my former coworkers are there.

You can just take a look, it's not like their faces are obstructed or anything.

[Berkut]

Anti-lockdown demonstrations in London today too. I had to go into town today and saw one poster for it with the slogan "We survived Spanish Flu without surveillance. NO VACCINE PASSPORTS." Which I don't feel is a great call to action

Surely anyone posting about how they survived spanish flu is being....like ironic? Maybe actually mocking the protesters?

[Jacob]

My point though is that Canada is not doing anything at all more altruistic than the US. They need vaccines for their citizens, and they are buying it as quickly as they can.

The US needs vaccine for its citizens, and it is producing it as quick as they can.

Either way, neither country to shipping off the vaccine they have (whether bought or produced) to other countries before getting their own vaccinated.

And yeah, if you really want to nail the US in a much more clear moral argument, it is that the US is using its wealth and power to favor, as usual, itself over other countries. There is a humanist argument to be made that regardless of the politics, the right thing to do is separate all ability to obtain vaccine from the distribution - the vaccine should all go to whomever needs it the most no matter where they are, irrespective of their nations ability to procure it - the problem with that though is that to make THAT moral argument, you have to condemn Canada right along with the US, and well....that's not the point of this kind of faux outrage, now is it?

My objection is simple - being pissed off at the US for acting the same way all other rich countries act, with the difference being in incredibly minor details easily explained by logistics and perfectly normal politics in democratic countries is bullshit when it is coming from other rich countries who are absolutely happy to use their own wealth to do exactly what the US is doing.

Yeah, fair enough Berkut.

I agree that globally, the rich countries are prioritizing themselves compared to the less rich ones and Canada has no special claim to righteousness there.

I also agree that nations will look after their own citizens and national interest first. Though, there's a range of ways to do that that involves more or less collaboration and co-ordination.

Under Trump, the collaboration and co-ordination aspect was at absolute minimum and lower than many of us would've thought (but to be fair, it was just one area where Trump went lower than what people previously thought were the bottom). The "total export ban" was still significantly below what I'd think of as the baseline of US-Canadian relations historically. With the "we'll loan you 1.5 million AZ doses" it gets closer to the historical baseline (thanks by the way ).

There are some lessons to be learned from how things played out and the implications of international supply chains. Some serious analysis will have to go into it, weighing costs, the potential for another Trump (or worse ), and so on.

But I agree with you, there's no cause for moral outrage involved.

[Berkut]

As always, I stand behind no person in my contempt for Trump, and I do think somewhere else in this thread I have a rant about how pissed off I was at how his administration treated our allies, *specifically Canada*, in our coordination and cooperation. It was both stupid from the standpoint of the obvious nationalistic signalling bullshit, but also from the standpoint of wasting a perfectly good crisis.

I mean, the reputation of the US in the world was helped how much by our behavior during WW2? When the US would ship tanks we badly needed to the USSR and Brits because that was the most effective way to hurt the Nazis at certain points.

The US could have and obviously should have used this global crisis to once again show that we are the leader in the world when it comes to ability and willingness to address a massive need that responds to science, research, and productive capacity.

Can you just imagine how the US would have looked if we had stepped up right from the start, declared this a global crisis, and then loudly proclaimed our dedication to getting the world vaccinated, and announced that our immediate priority was the vaccination of the US population, which is why we are dedicating 90% of US vaccine production to domestic consumption until the US was vaccinated completely, with the remaining 10% going to our global neighbors, but more importantly, that we would ramp up vaccine production continuously until there was enough to make sure the planet was vaccinated? And BTW, here is the Global Pandemic Response team, headed by the CDC and in cooperation with the WHO - they will be coordinating all global production with other democracies willing to work together on raw materials sharing and optimization?

Follow that up with some serious pressure behind the scenes on India and the EU (probably don't bother with Russia or China) to join a coordinated system to share production plans and material sharing as needed in the exact same way the Allies did during WW2?

Man, that would have been a fucking *bargain* of international credibility and goodwill. Sigh.

Fucking Trump. What is so damn frustrating is that this stuff is only hard in the details. In broad outlines, these are obvious moves, even if you are cynically just trying to advance US interests.

[Jacob]

I agree completely, Berkut.

[The Brain]

I don't see how we can consider nation states a good idea and then blame them for prioritising their own nations. That's the whole idea behind their existence.

I don't really see non-nation states (like the US) acting differently.

p



You know what I mean, don't demean yourself.

I actually don't know.

If we consider the existence of nation/tribal/political/whatever states whose role is to defend and prioritise a specific group of people (their citizens) as good/acceptable/proper, then we lose the moral ground to complain when they prioritise their specific group of people (their citizens) in time of a crisis.

I agree.

[The Brain]

I agree completely, Berkut.

Rooms are cheap in these difficult times I hear.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Now, that's not what happenned, and we're all fucked beause of some stupid chinese tradition that dictates that live animals should be raised in tiny cages near one another and be butchered at this place which happens to be the place they're sold to.  A recipe for disaster.  And it's going to happen again because nothing has changed there, and there's significant risks due the large population of bats carrying coronavirus in them and the great risk of inter-species jump.

while stupid I'd guess that is not necessarily the reason why we're all fucked. I'd say it's more to do with the fact that
a) there's a stupid culture of 'face' rather than 'facing up to'
and b) the natural penchant of autoritarian regimes (of which the CCP is the worst since Hitler and Stalin) to lie, lie and lie.

the result is ends up the same but if a) and b) weren't present (and especially reason b) things would have gone very differently indeed. Even with wetmarkets. But in this case b magnified massively the effects of a.

[Jacob]

Rooms are cheap in these difficult times I hear.

I suppose you would know.