BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

you seem to be missing the part where i didn't travel or party for the first 2 years of the pandemic. i've never broken any guidance, actually. i moved from one relaxing state-of-affairs to a country with a more draconian, not less, suite of public health measures. never complained about it, either. why? because the administration has been sensible enough to recognise that VACCINATION is clearly the best tool and the best means to return to normalcy. something which, against overwhelming evidence, you have persistently denied.

Do many other seasonal viruses cause actual brain damage?

seeing as i literally just said that any virus which attaches to receptors/cell-types found in the brain, causing the inflammatory response typical of an alien pathogen/immune reaction, can cause effects on cognition, the answer is: yes. are you even reading? do you even know the basics? why the fuck do you spend so much time disputing the findings of actual virologists, when you couldn't even pass a high-school biology exam? quick! keep finding scary-sounding news links in the national press! that's the same thing as knowledge!

inflammation in the brain tissue caused by infection is called 'encephalitis'. you should really know the basics before you start scaremongering about covid turning people into 'drooling idiots'. you sound like those concerned mumsnet posters who claim drugs turn children into 'flesh-eating zombies'.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2082798/
Influenza virus associated encephalopathy

https://www.nicswell.co.uk/health-news/ … -swine-flu
Brain problems from swine flu

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/12/3060
Long-Term Neuroinflammation Induced by Influenza A Virus Infection and the Impact on Hippocampal Neuron Morphology and Function

guess you better stay firmly inside every flu-season! you 'simply don't know' what might happen to you in 20-30 years time!

did i mention that recently a link was proven between people who had mono/glandular fever as children and multiple sclerosis? between measles and parkinson's? the viruses stick around in the organism/cerebrospinal fluid until late age and then begins to contribute to massive protein degeneration. did you ever have mono as a kid? bad luck, mate. your destiny with the nursing home and feeding tube is imminent.

Infection in childhood and neurological diseases in adult life
https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article-pd … 3-1-24.pdf

Mononucleosis in youth may increase risk for MS diagnosis
https://www.healio.com/news/neurology/2 … -diagnosis

guess you better stay inside forever!

oh and stop drinking alcohol. every time you imbibe a neurotoxic chemical you are killing off irreplacable brain cells. that last 4 pack of beers you just drank wiped out the cells storing the part about balancing a quadratic equation!



taken from ... the alzheimer's society. you couldn't make it up. but keep scaremongering about me becoming a 'drooling idiot' for, um, regularly getting my booster shot and continuing on with my healthy, well-balanced lifestyle as part of a reopened society that is 'living with covid'. idiot!

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-17 03:15:35)

At the same time, spare me the condescension of people saying they have or have already had COVID without ever having been tested for it.

I think what a lot of scoffing hindsight on that leaves out is that the hospitals needed them more. Our prep level for a pandemic was utterly damning.

korea removed its quarantine measures for all international travellers when its cases were at 300,000-600,000 per day. and this in a country that has been infamously jumpy at anything over about 500 daily cases for the majority of the pandemic. the turnaround in public opinion/feeling is absolutely staggering, to me as an onlooker. 'breaking point' comes to mind (as does 'presidential election' and 'new incoming administration'.)

got to salute an intelligent reading of the data and serious illness/deaths curve, though. hysteria about omicron is unfounded. especially if it's total fucking nonsense like 'it is a unique threat that causes brain damage', ahem. remember to keep on your mask every winter for those brain-melting flu seasons!

boosting the elderly and pivoting to focusing public healthcare measures on the most vulnerable is really the only sensible option when faced with such a highly infectious strain. not worth strangulating businesses and young people's lives for the next 3-4 months to only inevitably fail to contain or mitigate the spread in any way. it just isn't happening – not in this society that privileges office spaces and close social contact so much, anyway.

got to say that, compared to costly and resource-intensive quarantines, i don't quite understand why anyone would remove mask mandates. they are harmless and seem like no-brainers to me. can't imagine korea will be removing mask mandates any time soon.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-24 20:39:58)

yeah, i agree. i have no problems with mandates about masking in busy public spaces, most pressingly indoor ones, just as i have no problems with strong prods of the stick to get people vaccinated.

makes a lot more sense than shutting down 1/3rd of the national economy and making everyone suffer direct hits to their ability to earn a living, only for the virus to surge anyway.

Positive RAT, fuck this shit. PCR result 24-48 hrs.

Thats what meeting dozens of people in a new job will do. Most of it is being transmitted by kids and the parents are bringing it in to work.

Had a night of feverish sweats, feeling better already, feels like the flu - Jay was right.

I have great antibodies, possibly the greatest antibodies in the world, not concerned at this point.

haha. turns out it's not possible to have an actual, adult life with, e.g., a family or office job, and to perfectly avoid covid, is it?

how does it feel to be part of the great idiocracy?

i thought you said it was fine to just lockdown forever, stay-at-home, never meet people, never get covid, etc ... ?

I have great antibodies, possibly the greatest antibodies in the world, not concerned at this point.

perhaps the 3 vaccine shots, about which you talked so much shit, had something to do with that 'greatly mitigates against serious illness' thing?

Last edited by uziq (2022-04-08 20:57:51)

Who'd have thought that there would be a surge of traveling a lot after two years of populace suppression of the sort where you leave your own citizens stranded outside of the country rather than take them back and put them under quarantine.

Australia can't stay isolated forever, and this disease will most likely be an endemic part of human life. Controlling the severity of symptoms with vaccinations and boosters is more useful than walling in like North Korea.

Well fine then, but my point still stands.

I'm not happy about the flu existing either, but we don't yet have the technology and medical infrastructure to wipe it out. Sign me up for the supplemental nanobots. I'd like to opt for the model that gets good wireless reception.

Its funny how uziq's thinking and Jay's is the same.

We don't have to worry about global warming/covid because there'll be some mystery scientific solution in the future.
Meanwhile we should carry on as normal.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Yes, we can't cure flu, lets be careless and create more flu, and trust some future fantasy solution.

Just as long as people can travel. Because whats important is travel. Travel.

Exposure to pathogens strengthens immune systems. If you lived for decades in a sterile bubble, you'd probably wither like an War of the Worlds Martian the moment it was punctured. It's all about striking a balance.

All this driving towards a change in toxic work culture so that people stay home if they're feeling sick will hopefully be a result. You shouldn't have to worry about getting punished or even losing your job if you decide not to expose staff and customers to some mysterious bug you've caught. It shouldn't be a point of pride to go in anyway.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Its funny how uziq's thinking and Jay's is the same.

We don't have to worry about global warming/covid because there'll be some mystery scientific solution in the future.
Meanwhile we should carry on as normal.

Jay was wanting business as usual before the vaccines. Uzique supports reduced restrictions largely because we have vaccines now, and the virus itself was trending towards greater mildness.

Dilbert_X wrote:

After three nights of soaking fever I'm almost back to 100%

Brain fog - If anything my brain is working better than ever.

Looking forward to my Trump balcony moment.

Are you sure you have it? I mean some of the symptoms can run on with other maladies, and tests aren't 100% reliable.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

the virus itself was trending towards greater mildness.

A single datapoint is not a trend

Uzique supports reduced restrictions largely because we have vaccines now, and the virus itself was trending towards greater mildness.

plus the not inconsiderable point that delta/omicron and the more recent, much MUCH more infectious strains are simply too costly to contain, anyway. look at china for an example of the hell-on-earth that is unleashed in a vain effort to control a highly infectious pathogen. entire communities locked into their apartments and not even able to get food. seems totally proportionate: let's starve people and cause pregnant mothers to miscarry over a mild throat infection.

dilbert keeps ranting about travel as if australia's wave was unleashed by tourists. what he ignores is that the 'zero covid' system was failing a long time before the restrictions were lifted. australia, new zealand and china, all poster children of the zero-covid approach, seriously came undone by the more-infectious delta. omicron is 70x more infectious than delta, depending on your modelling/study of choice. how the fuck was it ever anything but inevitable that a generalised omicron wave would wash over the population? south korea gave in to omicron, too, and not because they're all desparate to don their sun visors and go travelling. it's such a fucking idiotic view of the world. the systems we had in place - 'we' as in the best-performing countries in the world - started to falter with the more infectious strains. you need an absolute, authoritarian level of control ... and even that doesn't work (cf. CCP's china). it's totally fruitless.

but no. australia has a major wave because of tourists. not because covid is now essentially a 70x more infectious illness with markedly less severe outcomes in the double/triple/quadruple vaccinated. retard.

Last edited by uziq (2022-04-10 23:34:12)