Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:And certain people of Slavic ancestry were ridiculing me for starting this thread.

Considering that basically everything you said in this thread was laughably incorrect, it is hard to not ridicule you, you know.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
People of European ancestry are most likely to be vulnerable.
People of New World ancestry are least vulnerable.

forgive me, but I seem to recall that most of the population in the states comes from Europe.

maybe I was wrong - maybe you all magically floated down from heaven with perfect genes and a perfect immune system?

isaac_newton wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
People of European ancestry are most likely to be vulnerable.
People of New World ancestry are least vulnerable.

forgive me, but I seem to recall that most of the population in the states comes from Europe.

maybe I was wrong - maybe you all magically floated down from heaven with perfect genes and a perfect immune system?

New World ancestry would be the Native populations.

gcomeau wrote:

cthia wrote:The panic may exceed that caused by Orson Wells' infamous radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds."

1. May? It already has by orders of magnitude. Wells only freaked out a small population for a few hours.

2. In this case, it's appropriate.

Yes, may. Again, you are too far removed - in this case, both from America and the human element.

The panic going on now has not exceeded the panic during the infamous radio broadcast in one point in axiomatic space.

I know it is asserted that a small segment of the population was frightened then. Some one million people were affected at the time. Many of those people were so afraid they fled their homes. They were so afraid that when they got to where they were headed they kept all of the lights out and were afraid to listen to the radio. They kept all power off, it was hot during the day. They lived in panic stricken, fear gripping terror for hours on end. Many of the ones who are still alive today may still be living with trauma and side effects, like nightmares. I know this for a fact because I talked to a very small girl who was days from her tenth birthday party when it all happened, who is probably still having nightmares.

How did I manage to talk to a little girl who experienced that before I was born? Time travel.

She was an elderly lady when I met her while I was in HS at an air show. She goes back in time in a heartbeat and reverts back to that little girl when she tells that story and the fear is still on her face. Kids were terror stricken back then while they watched the fear that was literally dripping off of adults.

So you see. I left room for the panic happening now to actually eclipse the panic that started then. Not in numbers, but in actual panic induced, fear gripped, sweat dripping, knuckle biting, pants wetting sense of doom.

That "allegedly" small population is a case study of why the government can claim that releasing information about aliens would panic the world.

.

n7axw wrote:Things are shutting down around here. Schools. Churches. Some stores. Wal-Mart is flooded with people shopping for groceries. I Haven't been in a situation with more than a half dozen people for over a week.

The thing is, what is the future going to look like? I can visualize a spike now, or if all the isolation proves effective a wave now. But then when we relax, the numbers go up again and we get a new spike or wave towards fall and on it could go. We can't maintain this fire drill forever.

About the only bright spot I see on the horizon is that someone will come up with a vaccine probably within less than a year. But my, oh my, the economy will be in shambles by then, not only here, but all over the world.

Don

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pretty much same in UK.

on the vaccine... don't hold your breath.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/when-will-a-coronavirus-vaccine-be-ready

Quite a few facilities are chasing this down.

however, there are several steps that have to be resolved
1) is it/they effective? i.e. will it be like the measles vaccine which work 99.9% of cases or will it be like some of the annual flu vaccines which are much less effective and therefore a help, but not a panacea

2) is it safe? No good killing or damaging more than are helped. This has to be checked in different ages/ethnicities.

3) how long will it take to get into mass, mass production - billions of units, not thousands as per ebola

Of course, all of these are soluable, but do require time. For 'normal' diseases I understand that this process can take several years even a decade. not an expert, but people seem to be saying still needs over a year.

Fortunately, COVID19 is much less lethal than Ebola or Mers, though it does seem to be much more spreadable. If C19 was as lethal as Ebola than I'm pretty sure that stage 2) for example would be gone or skimped.

A nice clear article below - not alarmist, but does seem to cover lots of questions:

here are the headings
- What do we know about the virus now?
- How can I stop myself and others from getting infected?
- How can you tell the difference between flu and Covid-19?
- What should I do if I have symptoms?
- If I get coronavirus, how sick will I get?
- What is the mortality rate of the new coronavirus?
- Can you get infected on public transport?
- Is there a cure for Covid-19?
- When will we get a vaccine?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/what-is-coronavirus-is-there-a-cure-mortality-rate-covid-19

cthia wrote:

gcomeau wrote:1. May? It already has by orders of magnitude. Wells only freaked out a small population for a few hours.

2. In this case, it's appropriate.

Yes, may. Again, you are too far removed - in this case, both from America and the human element.

Yeeeah... I've only lived here 20 years. Hello from the shelter in place order in the SF Bay Area.

The panic going on now has not exceeded the panic during the infamous radio broadcast in one point in axiomatic space.

I know it is asserted that a small segment of the population was frightened then. Some one million people were affected at the time. Many of those people were so afraid they fled their homes. They were so afraid that when they got to where they were headed they kept all of the lights out and were afraid to listen to the radio. They kept all power off, it was hot during the day. They lived in panic stricken, fear gripping terror for hours on end. Many of the ones who are still alive today may still be living with trauma and side effects, like nightmares. I know this for a fact because I talked to a very small girl who was days from her tenth birthday party when it all happened, who is probably still having nightmares.

How did I manage to talk to a little girl who experienced that before I was born? Time travel.

She was an elderly lady when I met her while I was in HS at an air show. She goes back in time in a heartbeat and reverts back to that little girl when she tells that story and the fear is still on her face. Kids were terror stricken back then while they watched the fear that was literally dripping off of adults.

So you see. I left room for the panic happening now to actually eclipse the panic that started then. Not in numbers, but in actual panic induced, fear gripped, sweat dripping, knuckle biting, pants wetting sense of doom.

That "allegedly" small population is a case study of why the government can claim that releasing information about aliens would panic the world.

.

Uh huh... so your entire basis for claiming that a few hours of a tiny portion of the country being freaked out by a radio broadcast exceeds the entire response to an ongoing pandemic impacting the entire planet for months is... you talked to a girl once about it and she seemed scared.

Ok.

gcomeau wrote:Uh huh... so your entire basis for claiming that a few hours of a tiny portion of the country being freaked out by a radio broadcast exceeds the entire response to an ongoing pandemic impacting the entire planet for months is... you talked to a girl once about it and she seemed scared.

Ok.

Let's also not forget that what he actually did (assuming I decode his post correctly) is talk to someone who was a little girl when the War of the Worlds thing happened, presumably decades after the fact. I'd hesitate to call the impressions of someone like that "reliable"; interesting, to be certain, but firmly in the realm of anecdote rather than data.

The panic triggered by WotW was certainly more immediate, more visceral: War not being an unknown concept after all.
No, the panic triggered by corona is something else, something deeper: In a lot of countries in the west, we are simply unused to such widescale disasters that require everyone to react. Earlier pandemics like SARS passed most of us by; sure, there were some areas that were affected, individual cases that went through hell, but it was something that for most people played out on the evening news. There were no curfews, no calls to shelter in place, not on the scale we see today. For the first time in a lot of people's lives, their freedom has been curtailed severely by something utterly beyond their control; while there are no scared mobs running through the streets, people are unsure how to react and thus fall back on making sure that they have all the necessities they need at home (quite why that translates to "buy all the toilet paper now!" is a bit beyond me).
Add to that the fact that, aside from its immediate effects, the secondary effects of quarantine mean that many, far too many, people now have to fear for their jobs and their livelihoods, and you have a recipe for something that will probably end up being far more traumatizing to far more people than WotW ever was.
In conclusion: Wells frightened a small number of people very deeply. Corona frightens a lot of people somewhat severely, and we don't know yet how it will all play out in the end. It may be that everything's back to normal by August. It may be that we'll still be here, sheltering, in December.

isaac_newton wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
People of European ancestry are most likely to be vulnerable.
People of New World ancestry are least vulnerable.

forgive me, but I seem to recall that most of the population in the states comes from Europe.

maybe I was wrong - maybe you all magically floated down from heaven with perfect genes and a perfect immune system?

Nah... we were floated in by the tooth fairy..

Don

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n7axw wrote:Nah... we were floated in by the tooth fairy..

Don
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So... you where payment for the teeth the fairy collected?