Swedish city to use chicken manure to deter crowds BBC - https://tinyurl.com/yd5yquyk The Swedish city of Lund is to spread chicken manure in its central park in an effort to deter crowds gathering for a festival. Tens of thousands of people usually descend on southern city to celebrate Walpurgis Night, which is marked across Scandinavia. But officials want to keep people away because of the coronavirus outbreak. There is no lockdown in Sweden, where data show most people have taken to voluntary social distancing. "Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April," the chairman of the local council's environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. Defending the decision to spread a ton of chicken manure in the park, he said: "We get the opportunity to fertilise the lawns, and at the same time it will stink and so it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer." The origins of Walpurgis Night date back to pagan celebrations of spring.
I know what it was when I took the exam when I was younger. I still have the result in my paperwork somewhere. But it will cost you some money if you want me to prove anything because i have no desire to go looking for it. .
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Coronavirus: Why Sweden’s virus policy is no failure People gather for a drink at an outdoor bar in Stockholm, Sweden. Picture: AP By HOLMAN W. JENKINS 12:22PM APRIL 29, 2020 570 Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Email I joked the other day that the media doesn’t do multivariate, but it wasn’t a joke. Sometimes it imposes a hard cap on what we can achieve with public policy when the press can’t fulfil its necessary communication function. This column isn’t about Sweden, but the press now claims Sweden’s Covid policy is “failing” because it has more deaths than its neighbours. Let me explain again: When you do more social distancing, you get less transmission. When you do less, you get more transmission. Almost all countries are pursuing a more-or-less goal, not a reduce-to-zero goal. Sweden expects a higher curve but in line with its hospital capacity. Sweden’s neighbours are not avoiding the same deaths with their stronger mandates, they are delaying them, to the detriment of other values. The only clear failure for Sweden would come if a deus ex machina of some sort were to arrive to cure COVID-19 in the near future. Then all countries (not just Sweden) might wish in retrospect to have suppressed the virus more until their citizens could benefit from the miracle cure. COVID-19 Australia at a glance New Daily Cases11 25-Jan Please, if you are a journalist reporting on these matters and can’t understand “flatten the curve” as a multivariate proposition, leave the profession. You are what economists call a “negative marginal product” employee. Your non-participation would add value. Your participation subtracts it. Let’s apply this to the US. Americans took steps to counter the 1957 and 1968 novel flu pandemics but nothing like indiscriminate lockdowns. Adjusted for today’s US population (never mind our older average age), 1957’s killed the equivalent of 230,000 Americans today and 1968’s 165,000. So far, coronavirus has killed 57,000. Before patting ourselves on the back, however, notice that we haven’t stopped the equivalent deaths, only delayed them while we destroy our economy and the livelihoods of millions of people. READ MORE:The man who stopped Sweden lockdown|Sweden a viral pandemic punching bag|‘Just act like adults’: Sweden goes it alone on COVID-19 That’s because public officials haven’t explained how to lift their unsustainable lockdowns while most of the public remains uninfected and there’s no vaccine. Hopefully we will demonstrate our mettle in the next chapter but I have yet to see it. All this belies another media trope, advanced to make many incoherent points, that the flu is a “nonserious” disease and not to be compared with COVID-19. In fact, the flu kills “only” 35,000 Americans a year because we have vaccines and millions of us have previously acquired immunity. Apply the flu’s estimated 0.1 per cent death rate not to the 10 per cent of the population susceptible to today’s familiar strains but to the 60 per cent likely to be infected by a novel strain. Result: 200,000 deaths in today’s population. The 1957, 1968 and even 1918 strains are still with us, contributing to an estimated 650,000 flu deaths worldwide every year. The most up-to-date estimate from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine predicts the new coronavirus will be fatal in a flu-like 0.1 per cent to 0.36 per cent of cases. This implies 141,000 to 655,800 further deaths in the U.S. over the next year or so. Yes, these deaths will be heavily concentrated among the elderly. Another bit of journalistic virtue-signalling holds that it’s now “ageism” to take this into account, though a disease that kills a newborn is obviously more costly to him or her than one that kills the same person at 95. The regulatory state that liberals idolise has long recognised as much in weighing the value of proposed lifesaving interventions. Let me commend a plan by Avik Roy and his colleagues at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, which they expressly call a pessimism plan: A vaccine won’t be developed. An effective treatment won’t soon materialise. Universal testing will not quickly scale up. Infection won’t be found to confer lasting immunity. We can hope for success in these areas but betting our national survival on hitting a hole-in-one is not a strategy. From my view, the most important thing the government could do now is give people the information they need to resurrect the economy. The World Health Organisation’s Maria Van Kerkhove, on return from Wuhan, said flatly the disease was not spread in casual interaction but in close family and institutional settings. Hendrik Streeck, the virologist leading an investigation of a severe outbreak in Germany’s Heinsberg district, found similar results. He saw little evidence that shopping or even touching contaminated surfaces posed a significant risk to a well-advised public. In China, a study of 318 clusters (involving 1,245 patients) found 80 per cent involved transmission in the home, 34 per cent in public transportation. Only two people were found to have been infected in an outdoor setting. In Hong Kong, where people practice good social distancing, lockdowns haven’t been needed to keep hospitals from overflowing. Much remains to be found out: aerosols vs. droplets, the effectiveness of masks. Hand washing is probably a good idea but doesn’t have a lot of peer-reviewed science behind it. This is information the public needs as it resumes work and socialising in defiance of those single-variable thinkers who imagine civilisation will put itself in a deep freeze until a vaccine materialises
That is EXACTLY what is going to be mandated, when the weather warms up in mid June. This shit is never going to end.
I ended my lockdown today, discarded my masks and hung out and did electrical work on 3 different boats in the marina. One guy is an experienced cabinet maker so we are exchanging electrical work for some cabinet finishing work. I'm so done with this. Zero fear, zero concern and zero fucks given. Cowards can kiss my ruddy bum.
You are so selfish. Don’t you care about saving lives? The only rational solution is to go out in a scuba re-breather with a full insulated hazmat suit. Its heavy AF, but don't be an asshole, we all have to do our part. So haul that bitch.
LOL the marina tenants, the marina staff and the security staff all pretty much said screw it this morning. We locked down until the threat of infected people overwhelming the local medical system has passed and now we are done. Mission Accomplished! My mom is going to participate in a study of double deltas (she has 2 copies of CCR5-delta32) to determine if they possess partial, full or no Covid immunity. There are quite a few of them (1% of world population). They have, to varying degrees, immunity to Smallpox, Bubonic Plague and partial or full immunity to HIV (she has full immunity). I forgot to ask where but I'm assuming its at Loma Linda, the biggest research facility in her area. My uncle is going to take her down there. He also helps me pay for her residential care, the big chunk that Medicare does not pay. Its interesting and may affect me indirectly. I'm a single delta (one copy of CCR5-delta32). If the doubles are immune it is possible that I may have partial immunity. To be honest, I've never been completely clear on what partial immunity means but most of the time it just means resistance. This virus is supposed to have some structural similarity to HIV so maybe she will luck out. Her family is Pictish (Aboriginal Scots) and come from a village in the far North. A few people survived one the plague waves with this mutation. Since they were the only ones left they ended up populating a small corner of the UK. They also have notable longevity. Double delta is not all good news. The strength against viruses is accompanied in some people with a documented vulnerability to bacterial diseases. Strong against viruses, weak against bacteria. I've gotten MRSA a couple of times. The two most common causes of death in my family over the last 200 years have been sepsis and falling off ladders lol.