The Corona Virus

[Razade]

Thats nothing. One of our towns is just on fire. Forever. Turns out that building a town on a coal mine and then lighting it on fire is a bad idea.

It was even the inspiration of a video game. Silent Hill is based on it. Centralia still exists by the way and people still live there. It's a bit more complex than them lighting the coal mine on fire though. People burn trash, and shouldn't, and that's what led to the fire. Burning trash sparked a coal fire which sparked the town literally melting beneath them.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It was even the inspiration of a video game. Silent Hill is based on it. Centralia still exists by the way and people still live there. It's a bit more complex than them lighting the coal mine on fire though. People burn trash, and shouldn't, and that's what led to the fire. Burning trash sparked a coal fire which sparked the town literally melting beneath them.

Was this yet another attempt of the US at outdoing the USSR, or vice versa? Or did both superpowers go for everburning pits of fossil fuels independently?

GW

[Razade]

Was this yet another attempt of the US at outdoing the USSR, or vice versa? Or did both superpowers go for everburning pits of fossil fuels independently?

GW

The Centralia fire started in 1962, so if it's the former it's the former USSR's copy job. As I understand it, Darvaza's actual start of fire isn't 100% certain, nor is when the fire started. One can only thank Soviet era record keeping for that. Cenrtalia also won't burn as long (as far as I understand) as Darvaza. Rough estimates say Centralia has another 100-200 years to go. Hard to say really.

[Keltest]

It was even the inspiration of a video game. Silent Hill is based on it. Centralia still exists by the way and people still live there. It's a bit more complex than them lighting the coal mine on fire though. People burn trash, and shouldn't, and that's what led to the fire. Burning trash sparked a coal fire which sparked the town literally melting beneath them.

Every now and then my friends and I have a moment of realization that hey, we are actually within driving distance of what is basically a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and its just... normal for it to be there. And then we usually try to think of something else.

[Peelee]

Every now and then my friends and I have a moment of realization that hey, we are actually within driving distance of what is basically a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and its just... normal for it to be there. And then we usually try to think of something else.

Oh, I didn't realize y'all lived so close to Mississippi.

[Keltest]

Oh, I didn't realize y'all lived so close to Mississippi.

Mississippi is an ordinary hellscape, thank you very much.

[Rockphed]

Speaking of fires that nobody can put out, near Socorro, New Mexico, I think there is a tire fire that has been burning for 20 years. At some point they buried it, but it still burns.

[Forum Explorer]

Tell me about it. We're under emergency orders to not have contact with anybody from other households for the next month. I keep seeing fairly large groups of often maskless people in the hallways of my apartment building, which is all 1 bedroom units. Definitely not part of the same household. Worse, there's quite a few older residents in the building, particularly on the first floor.

And the real kicker is that, although definitely necessary, the damn order's at least 3 weeks too late. It's in full exponential growth mode around here, which has been obvious to anybody who could read a graph for all of November and much of October. But no, we had to keep the bars open. Well those are closed now, the local schools have gone full distance, and we've locked ourselves into several hundred excess deaths - in the best case scenario where people actually take the new order seriously, stay home, and get the transmission rate down ASAP. Which, if my apartment is anything to go by, isn't going to happen for a lot of the population.

Wow, are people that thick-headed to understand the seriousness of the situation? I cut off one of my Facebook friends because he thinks that the pandemic is a scam and he refused to wear a mask. I block him off of Facebook after that because I don't want to associate with him or anyone else who doesn't have a damn brain for not taking the pandemic seriously. I don't need friends like that.

The greatest stress to my mental health is other people not taking the virus seriously. Black Friday comes by and naturally there are massive crowds and I just want to scream.

And the greatest lesson I've learned from this is that you have to actually force people to take appropriate action to protect public health. Otherwise they simply won't do it and you'll have a bigger problem than if you had just forced them from day 1.

I'm quite introverted myself, but this is month 8 of The Living Room Saga. I was planning on a nice long weekend with the parents, doing fun things in the woodshop, but alas no. Or I could be going to my girlfriend's parents, but, also no. Minnesota has banned meetings between different households until the 20th of December, and I live alone. So this one's gonna be a bit rough.

I feel ya bud. God willing the lockdown will work and you can see your family for Chirstmas.

[veti]

The greatest stress to my mental health is other people not taking the virus seriously. Black Friday comes by and naturally there are massive crowds and I just want to scream.

Lots of people have read that their demographic has a 99.9% survival rate, and to them that's indistinguishable from 100%. After all, lots of (mostly young) people take risks that big on a routine basis, just (e.g.) to avoid setting their alarm for ten minutes earlier.

So for them, they're being asked to care on behalf of others. The risk is remote. But the reward for taking the risk is personal and immediate.

Economists know this problem, it's called "externality", and in >50 years of discussion nobody has come up with a very satisfactory way of handling it. Government mandates are only as strong as the perceived will to enforce them.

[Bartmanhomer]

The greatest stress to my mental health is other people not taking the virus seriously. Black Friday comes by and naturally, there are massive crowds and I just want to scream.

And the greatest lesson I've learned from this is that you have to force people to take appropriate action to protect public health. Otherwise, they simply won't do it and you'll have a bigger problem than if you had just forced them from day 1.



I feel ya bud. God willing the lockdown will work and you can see your family for Christmas.

Well I don't celebrate Black Friday's. It get too chaotic as it is.

[Rogar Demonblud]

I take Black Friday Shoppers as proof that humans are actually poorly disguised orcs.

[Keltest]

I take Black Friday Shoppers as proof that humans are actually poorly disguised orcs.

I love Black Friday. The store is always empty, and its much calmer than usual.

No, im not being sarcastic, i just work at a grocery store.

[Bartmanhomer]

So one of the staff members who's female brings her son to my job today. They're the only two people who don't want to wear a face mask. Like seriously what the hell? Everybody else including me is wearing face wear why can both of them do the same? I don't understand these anti-masker.

[Xyril]

I love Black Friday. The store is always empty, and its much calmer than usual.

No, im not being sarcastic, i just work at a grocery store.

I skipped it this year (mostly because the main things I wanted to buy in person were firearms related, which around here means that the other shopper disproportionately overlap with the anti-mask demographic.)

However, I heard things were much better this year in my area--though obviously "better" might still be too crowded for comfort to many. Some stores cut back on their promotions, while others made more of them available online or over a few weeks--which had been a slow trend for years that only got accelerated by the pandemic. Also, the trend towards more online shopping in general was accelerated by the pandemic, meaning that a lot of folks came into this season much more accustomed to online shopping, whereas previously didn't shop online at all or preferred brick and mortar for "important" purchases they don't bouncing around in the mail for a few days or doorbuster deals they're afraid of losing to bad internet or software bugs. With that, plus the fear and economic uncertainty, and whatever restrictions your locality has in place, and you have far fewer shoppers rushing the stores on the same day.

Also, for some segments of shoppers, actually buying stuff is incidental to being out there and enjoying the chaos of this weirdly American holiday. Picking up a few things while dancing around the crazy people fighting to get $150 off a new iPad is pretty entertaining, but much less so if you're also putting yourself at risk of a deadly disease.

[The Random NPC]

I love Black Friday. The store is always empty, and its much calmer than usual.

No, im not being sarcastic, i just work at a grocery store.

I called out on Black Friday, my boss keeps thinking that this'll be the year when nobody has any leftovers and keeps scheduling everyone to work that day.

[Forum Explorer]

Well I don't celebrate Black Friday's. It get too chaotic as it is.

I'm not too fond of the 'holiday' myself, and usually try and buy things on some other day. Or just not buy things unless I really need them.

[sihnfahl]

And the greatest lesson I've learned from this is that you have to actually force people to take appropriate action to protect public health. Otherwise they simply won't do it and you'll have a bigger problem than if you had just forced them from day 1.

I think it depends on the area? Some places, most will, just because they have more awareness beyond the I.

[Tyndmyr]

The greatest stress to my mental health is other people not taking the virus seriously. Black Friday comes by and naturally there are massive crowds and I just want to scream.

And the greatest lesson I've learned from this is that you have to actually force people to take appropriate action to protect public health. Otherwise they simply won't do it and you'll have a bigger problem than if you had just forced them from day 1.

This isn't all that clear, honestly. People burnout after too long of lockdown/emergency, and what was previously scary becomes, well, normal. Even places that locked down early and hard(I'm in one of them) are now experiencing fatigue, and even with fairly stringent rules and people mostly attempting to follow guidance, pretty high infection rates.

Pandemics are an awful lot more complicated than "force compliance on day one"

I mean, I feel you in that I wish there was a nice, easy answer that would guarantee safety, but sometimes that's just not the case. Some of the biggest factors(population density, access to first world medical care) are things that by the time you have a pandemic, it's honestly pretty hard to do anything about them.

I skipped it this year (mostly because the main things I wanted to buy in person were firearms related, which around here means that the other shopper disproportionately overlap with the anti-mask demographic.)

Those things are largely sold out at present, so probably a good call on skipping it.

I'm kind of in the same boat. So, zero black friday shopping for me. I'm not a great fan of shopping when everyone else is on a general basis, even if a pandemic isn't around, nor waking up early to stand in lines. If people enjoy that, cheers I guess, but not a great time from my perspective.

I'm quite introverted myself, but this is month 8 of The Living Room Saga. I was planning on a nice long weekend with the parents, doing fun things in the woodshop, but alas no. Or I could be going to my girlfriend's parents, but, also no. Minnesota has banned meetings between different households until the 20th of December, and I live alone. So this one's gonna be a bit rough.

Yeah, I feel that. Even just a change of scenery is nice sometimes. Staring at the same four walls gets pretty old after a while.

[sktarq]

well it looks like the UK is jumping in on the vaccine.

probably expect Europe and US by end of the week now the dam is opened.

[Xyril]

Those things are largely sold out at present, so probably a good call on skipping it.

Oh yeah, due to the confluence of events demand is far stripping supply for new guns, but I am pretty much done with buying more. (Building more, on the other hand...)

However, Black Friday often has some great deals on ammo that you don't have to look too hard into. I know you can do better online if you wait for it, but that often involves larger quantities from lesser known sources. For this sort of thing, I like the reassurance of knowing that there's a large, well-capitalized company on the strict products liability chain. It's also not a bad time to pick up accessories, cases, targets, and that sort of thing for the range, or blinds and such folks who actually go hunting.

Range time's actually come to make up a larger proportion of my social time--I suppose it lends itself very well to physical distancing--so it would have been nice to pick up some cheap brass.

[pendell]

well it looks like the UK is jumping in on the vaccine.

probably expect Europe and US by end of the week now the dam is opened.

Yes, there's a certain irony that the UK approved Pfizer before our own FDA did.

If there's anyone in the field here, I have two questions as a layman:
1) This seems like nothing short of a miracle that we can move a vaccine to this stage so quickly. Not just the raw research, but clearing the bureaucratic hurdles to make it happen.

2) Does this imply that our medical system can work much faster than it normally does, and that these events will allow us to smooth the pipeline for faster delivery of other vaccines in the future? Or is this a one-time never-to-be-repeated event, like the Apollo moon shot?

I ask, because as a software engineer I know there are frequently flaws and inefficiency in any process, and testing is one of the major stumbling blocks to fast delivery.

Case in point from my own profession: Staging Environments . Ten years ago if you proposed releasing directly to production, as opposed to a near-production stage environment, everyone in the room would look at you as if you were mad, and you'd be looking for a job ten minutes later. But staging environments are being done away with; instead, the new hotness is to feature flag out untested code so it doesn't impact the rest of production. It turns out that it was very, very difficult to get a staging environment to be truly production-like, with the result that errors would frequently crop up in production anyway that would be missed in the lower environment. So it was just an extra step that cost development time without providing much in the way of benefit.

Hence, the new hotness in SE is to deploy directly into production, using feature flags to safeguard untested code. This allows pushing stuff out in hours instead of days, and days instead of weeks, because there's a whole step in the process, a cumbersome and lengthy step, that's just not there any more.

Now, I'm reasoning by analogy because this isn't necessarily the case in medicine even though it is an issue in my own profession. But, humans being humans, it wouldn't surprise me if there are steps in the research process that have outlived their usefulness but remain in the pipeline because legal requirements or bureaucratic inertia keeps them in place -- until an emergency forces us to bypass them and we find they haven't been needed for twenty years .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Does this imply that our medical system can work much faster than it normally does, and that these events will allow us to smooth the pipeline for faster delivery of other vaccines in the future? Or is this a one-time never-to-be-repeated event, like the Apollo moon shot?

Yes, and sort of. Yes, of course the medicine development process can work a lot faster if enormous resources are poured in, and many governments divert their own processes to assist. But that only happened because this was a plague that was infecting millions, killing a significant percentage and wrecking the world economy, thus the attention. Thyroid cancer, say, is a horrific disease that could use something like that, but it is also extremely rare, non-contagious and it is but one type of cancer amongst many. No-one is going to divert a significant percentage of the world GDP to solve it quickly, not at the expense of everything else.

As to the whole stages of development: I've seen my shares of implementations of UAT/Testing/Staging or whatever they call them, but all come to be a buffer between dev and prod. In some places it was rubber-stamping, in some places it was utterly useless, and in some places it actually worked as advertised. Interestingly, my experience is opposite of yours: lately I have seen a lot more well-implemented, actually useful pre-production environments. No, they're still not full production, and can suffer the "we didn't see that coming, because prod is different", but it is a much cleaner version of dev, far more appropriate to do test runs, and usually one that is appropriate to show off to stakeholders without scarring them about what goes on under the hood.

Grey Wolf

[Xyril]

Yes, there's a certain irony that the UK approved Pfizer before our own FDA did.

If there's anyone in the field here, I have two questions as a layman:
1) This seems like nothing short of a miracle that we can move a vaccine to this stage so quickly. Not just the raw research, but clearing the bureaucratic hurdles to make it happen.

2) Does this imply that our medical system can work much faster than it normally does, and that these events will allow us to smooth the pipeline for faster delivery of other vaccines in the future? Or is this a one-time never-to-be-repeated event, like the Apollo moon shot?

Just from what I've read, mRNA vaccines--combined with developments that have generally increased the speed and reduced the cost of sequencing, understanding, and editing genes--probably represent a lasting shift that can accelerate vaccine development for numerous diseases. Not only do these methods potentially speed up researchers' ability to get to a viable test vaccine compared to developing live culture vaccines, the lack of live cultures might mean that adequate safety testing will be simplified.

That said, we're not going to see something like this again (hopefully.) When people perceive a singularly desperate situation, they tend to reevaluate what they deem acceptable in terms of economic cost and human risk.

[sktarq]

Meh.
The mRNA vaccines have not been all that much faster than the russian and UK attenuated virus ones. A couple weeks.
And while the mRNA route is certainly likely to be added to quiver a standard vaccine option it will only be likely help in a minority of cases...and that minority is important. Having (X+1) methods vs (X) methods is a very good thing. But Covid is a nearly perfect candidate for an mRNA target due to its structure (the spike protein in particular) so while it is an important advancement and will open new doors it is not a panacea.

In other news going in a yet harder lockdown here in so cal probably in 48 hrs as the triggers have been set (today) at where things are expected to be tmw. Which is a bit shifty to me...just call the lockdown if warranted not beat around the bush.

[Xyril]

so while it is an important advancement and will open new doors it is not a panacea.

I don't think anybody said it was. To me, the main advantage is in terms of safety: Anything without live virus is generally safer, which means that even under normal circumstances, a more abbreviated safety/human trial phase might be cons

The mRNA vaccines have not been all that much faster than the russian and UK attenuated virus ones. A couple weeks.

I can't speak for the UK, but I would be surprised if the Russian one didn't circumvent what would normally be considered necessary safety "bureaucracy" for an attenuated viral vaccine. While the present circumstances arguably call for taking greater risks, I don't think it would be a fair comparison since we're generally not willing to do so for "normal" diseases.

[sihnfahl]

In other news going in a yet harder lockdown here in so cal probably in 48 hrs as the triggers have been set (today) at where things are expected to be tmw. Which is a bit shifty to me...just call the lockdown if warranted not beat around the bush.

I consider the wait rather than an immediate lockdown sort of a 'okay, this is going to happen soon, so get X done to cover...'

Foods. Medicines. Notifying employees. Caregivers. The usual things that go into cities and populations.

Rather than scramble at the last minute.

[Bartmanhomer]

I'm not too fond of the 'holiday' myself, and usually try and buy things on some other day. Or just not buy things unless I need them.

I know right. People are very uncivilized for Black Friday. Like is all the craziness is even necessary?

So anyway. I want Covid to go away already. Like how long do I have to keep wearing my face mask anyway?

[Mystic Muse]

I know right. People are very uncivilized for Black Friday. Like is all the craziness is even necessary?

It's completely unnecessary.

So anyway. I want Covid to go away already. Like how long do I have to keep wearing my face mask anyway?

If I had to guess, playing it safe, until September or so.

[pendell]

Meh.
The mRNA vaccines have not been all that much faster than the russian and UK attenuated virus ones. A couple weeks.
And while the mRNA route is certainly likely to be added to quiver a standard vaccine option it will only be likely help in a minority of cases...and that minority is important. Having (X+1) methods vs (X) methods is a very good thing. But Covid is a nearly perfect candidate for an mRNA target due to its structure (the spike protein in particular) so while it is an important advancement and will open new doors it is not a panacea.

In other news going in a yet harder lockdown here in so cal probably in 48 hrs as the triggers have been set (today) at where things are expected to be tmw. Which is a bit shifty to me...just call the lockdown if warranted not beat around the bush.

I actually haven't heard anything about the Russian vaccine lately. How's that coming?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Bartmanhomer]

It's completely unnecessary.





If I had to guess, playing it safe, until September or so.

Yay! *claps*