Marvin the Martian: Even before the post quoted below, I would have said that your posts on this demonstrate signs of what I would call "injured thinking." Catastrophic thinking and black-and-white thinking are a couple of signs of injured thinking.
I have an anxiety disorder that makes avoiding them all but impossible, especially in times of great stress and/or uncertainty.
You have a thinking injury. That makes the extra stress of this time extra hard on you. I don't envy you. I would strongly suggest that you take the advice of your medical/therapeutic advisors and go take care of your injury, as best you can, under these circumstances. There's not much I can do for you from here, except extend sympathy and hope for better days.
You'll have to judge for yourself whether continued participation on this thread is helping or harming you. I hope it's helping; I believe Shipmates mean well toward you, and perhaps other perspectives might be helpful in gaining clarity and coping. But if it isn't helping, go and take care of yourself as best you can in these circumstances.
With all that said, AIUI, the policy of the Ship is to offer no special quarter to those who identify themselves as having significant differences in thinking due to neurological differences or mental health issues.
So yes: you are missing the point. That weird story about the missionary sacrificing others for his beliefs puts you in the position of the missionary - making choices for others. How keen would you be to see your wife and child in the position of the 'others'? Do their lives not count? Even if you would cheerfully sacrifice your own life in order to return to Life Before, perhaps you might reconsider if you thought about those you love being sacrificed by others. If I said, "I would risk your child's life in order to return to my knitting club" I doubt you would find that either ethical or logical.
Right wing and libertarian people are showing a lot of injured thinking. I assume that they resent their individual freedom being curtailed, and also resent collective action being taken, so there are many comments about dictatorship, etc. Also, lots of denial, it's being exaggerated, it's no worse than flu, or as Bolsonaro calls it, the sniffles. The UK is interesting, as we have a right wing govt taking massive state action, I guess that the prospect of 250 000 deaths made them feel green about the gills. Trump, oh heck, words fail me.
Right wing and libertarian people are showing a lot of injured thinking.
Hey, who are you to say Rand Paul can't go work out at the Senate gym just because he has COVID-19? Is it really fair to destroy Rand Paul's life forever just because he's infected with a highly contagious disease? Ha ha, just kidding! It's other people's lives which will be destroyed forever because of Rand Paul.
The clinic where my wife works (as therapist), informed her that they are now open. She turned the air blue, I'm afraid, no f***ing way, is the gist of it. It doesn't feel safe.
My health clinic is running 1:1 virtual Pilates sessions via Zoom, which works OK for me, but the osteopath who has also been treating me is very wary about re-opening.
I do have an appointment with him at the end of this month, but it is likely that PPE (if available!) will figure muchly, if, indeed, the appointment goes ahead.
Medical and allied services are delivered by video call here. Personal contact requires a series of conditions and social distancing. Up to full gown, mask, face shield etc.
Zoom by the way does not pass HIPA requirements in Canada (Health info and privacy acts).
Right wing and libertarian people are showing a lot of injured thinking.
Do you also make fun of people with back injuries?
Marvin the Martian has identified himself with having a specific type of injury. I don't think it's either compassionate or helpful to try to score points off unseen others with this kind of comment.
‘What if’ thoughts are very destructive. I would avoid them.
I have an anxiety disorder that makes avoiding them all but impossible, especially in times of great stress and/or uncertainty.
Since this is the case, I doubt anybody talking to you is going to do much good. We simply can't make the promise ("this will end on date X") that you want. Only God could do that.
So it becomes a question of managing your anxiety disorder. I both have one and live with someone else who has one, and during the pandemic, we are both way, way over the edge. But we have strategies and medication and instructions on when and how to use them. Do you?
Right wing and libertarian people are showing a lot of injured thinking.
Do you also make fun of people with back injuries?
Marvin the Martian has identified himself with having a specific type of injury. I don't think it's either compassionate or helpful to try to score points off unseen others with this kind of comment.
If the virus spreads from a hotspot, I assume it will do so gradually. I can't see it leapfrogging all those counties.
If the virus spreads from a hotspot, it will follow the people. The virus doesn't have its own transport.
So if some infected hotspot worker has a mother, boyfriend, or whatever in your vicinity, the virus will absolutely jump to you.
Plus there's the conundrum of testing. If my guesstimate that 4 out of 5 COVID-19 deaths in Virginia are going undiagnosed, what are the odds that limited testing resources (and American testing resources are frighteningly limited) are being diverted to known hotspots, leaving new hotspots to develop undetected?
Can you contact your doc/therapist to discuss other strategies that will work with what you have available? note: said other person in my life is right now running through HIS strategies because we've had a freak-out morning.
Right wing and libertarian people are showing a lot of injured thinking.
Do you also make fun of people with back injuries?
Marvin the Martian has identified himself with having a specific type of injury. I don't think it's either compassionate or helpful to try to score points off unseen others with this kind of comment.
Where do you get making fun from?
I don't think you are using the term "injured thinking" in the way I was using it. I was using to describe thinking that shows signs of diagnosable neurological difference (which I grant might not be in the category of injury) or mental health issues. I don't think denial or exaggeration are clear signs of disordered thinking, which were two aspects of thinking among 'right wing and libertarian' people you described.
In the circumstances of Marvin's posting, it seemed like a shitty generalization and/or a cheap shot. If I misread you, I apologize.
If you truly think that right wing and libertarian are showing a lot of injured thinking, in the sense of showing signs of diagnosable neurological difference and/or mental health issues, may I suggest starting another Purg thread about it? It's not an unknown opinion. One famous rant by comedian Rick Mercer included these impassioned questions: "What is WRONG with Conservatives? Were they not loved as children?" Certainly personality disorders get thrown around a lot in relation to right wing political leaders, Trump being the prime example of supposed narcissistic personality disorder.
But we have strategies and medication and instructions on when and how to use them. Do you?
Medication, yes. But all my strategies involved going other places. Which isn’t an option right now.
I hear you, dude. Many of my happy places are currently unavailable. My anxieties are mostly about getting fat and flabby and missing important medical tests and physio appointments. I'm not going to list all the parts of my body that hurt. I nearly had a meltdown on Saturday trying to refill my prescriptions via telemedicine and I'm going to be a wreck on Wednesday because I have a yucky meeting. I used to be able to wash all my anxieties away in the pool and feel like a superhero at skate class. No more.
Others have commented on various false dichotomies presented in this thread. Here's a real one: adapt or die. And if there's one thing humans are good at, it is adapting.
Marvin, life changes constantly. If you had everything arranged just perfect, that's great, but it was never guaranteed to continue forever, virus or no virus. I've done several group therapy programs and we always spent part of the last session developing a personal plan for handling relapses. You're a smart person and a problem solver; you're capable of figuring this out. You might also want to do a little research on how people with disabilities define quality of life and learn what ableism is.
List of countries with at least 10,000 known COVID-19 cases.
United States - 1,160,774 (919,605 / 173,725 / 67,444)
[snip]
[The last figure is the known death toll to date.] If American states were treated as individual countries twenty of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Turkey and Russia.
[/url].
Lest we forget:
Notably, in late February, the president said the spread of Covid-19 in the US was not inevitable and the danger to Americans “remains very low”. He predicted that the number of cases diagnosed in the country, just 15 that time, could fall to zero in “a few days”.
We should not be complacent about the distance we are from a COVID 19 hotspot, after all we thought we had a Pacific Ocean between us and the Chinese; but, just to be sure we closed our borders to them, only to find out the virus that hit us came through Europe, not directly from China.
Zoom by the way does not pass HIPA requirements in Canada (Health info and privacy acts).
Source? Zoom say they comply with HIPPA in the US.
For the USA as in Canada, health care is licenced by the state, in Canada by the province. There are national umbrella organizations which provide guidance and advice but they don't legislate. I suspect you are right that some jurisdictions have not advised against Zoom; I know the situation in Canada. In my office, we started with Zoom the day of partial lockdown (14 March, full lockdown was 17March). The info re Zoom in mid-March was that it uses end-to-end encryption. But this has been shown to be false. Zoom uses a "shared key" for encryption. It is not end-to-end, although they said it was. The password and meeting ID are stored on servers, some of them in China. I can't find the link which started this off in Canada just now, but this one gives you the flavour: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/taiwan-zoom-video-conference-1.5524384 . This gives more details: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes
Zoom says it use AES-256 encryption to encode video and audio data traveling between Zoom servers and Zoom clients (i.e., you and me). But researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, in a report posted April 3, found that Zoom actually uses the somewhat weaker AES-128 algorithm.
"We discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality," the Citizen Lab report says, such as "governments worried about espionage, businesses concerned about cybercrime and industrial espionage, healthcare providers handling sensitive patient information" and "activists, lawyers, and journalists working on sensitive topics."
The next thing which happened for us locally is that the provincial health authority (runs the public health system) and university said it should not be used. then several regulatory bodies and private health care insurers provided the advice that it should not be used for confidential patient information. Note that licencing bodies here (elsewhere?) operate on a complaints basis. If the thing works and there's no complaint, no problem. However if there's a problem and complaint, it's very bad for the practitioner.
In my office, we have been forced to switch out. I don't think Zoom will return to medical and allied care, nor gov't where secret info is discussed. Its credibility is gone now. Sow e use Microsoft Teams and Doxy.me. The Sask Health Authority uses Pexip, which I suspect they use because they bought a mass licence. For non-confidential meetings where we just need to talk, Jitsi is okay- but no screen sharing. They operate like Zoom with shared keys but you can actually see what server is being used.
And of course the next few weeks will show just how reckless some of the US States are being.
Over 50,000 new cases over the last two days and close to 3/4 of those outside the epicentres of New York and New Jersey. Serious/Critical cases steady for the moment at 16,000. Getting on for 200,000 new cases in the past week. And new cases will have already fed the epidemic before being diagnosed.
This really does look like very big risk time for experimental relaxation of controls.
United Arab Emirates - 14,730 (11,627 / 2,966 / 137)
Poland - 14,006 (9,213 / 4,095 / 698)
Romania - 13,512 (7,425 / 5,269 / 818)
Ukraine - 12,331 (10,409 / 1,619 / 303)
Indonesia - 11,587 (8,769 / 1,954 / 864)
South Korea - 10,804 (1,267 / 9,283 / 254) 2.7%
Bangladesh - 10,143 (8,752 / 1,209 / 182)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1.
Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Russia and Turkey.
Bangladesh has joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
For non-confidential meetings where we just need to talk, Jitsi is okay- but no screen sharing. They operate like Zoom with shared keys but you can actually see what server is being used.
Our church happens to use Jitsi, partly because of the concerns you cite, but I have learned a lot about Zoom in recent weeks for business reasons, and I think many of your concerns are at the least outdated. Zoom 5.0 is being rolled out in the next few weeks and will be a mandatory upgrade after May 30. One of the things it does is let you configure which countries the servers you use are in - and amongst other reasons, HIPPA compliance is a big one.
The company certainly has a "move fast and break things" culture and was caught unawares by the massive growth in non-professional use due to covid-19. But in my view a lot of the complaints about Zoom are down to inexperienced users not using it appropriately. Perhaps not surprisingly, it uses Zoom for its own board meetings right now, so it must be reasonably sure it's secure...
Lots of chatter going on, that people are too afraid to break the lockdown. Damn right. I will need some convincing that it's safe out there. And the sight of Boris or Raab exhorting me, would be as inviting as a piranha. No doubt big business will be keen to reassure their low paid workers, that it's safe to go in the water - after you, sir.
And as @quetzalcoatl says, your dichotomy is unreal. I don't see it serving any purpose other than to fuel your own anxieties.
If nothing else, it's revealing the people who think there is no price that isn't worth paying to avoid an untimely death.
All I'm really looking for is some kind of reassurance that lockdown and social distancing will end that isn't conditional on the hope of there being a scientific solution first.
No one is talking about this current situation going on forever. Though I think something is missing in your analysis; even in a world where a much more lax approach to lifting the lockdown was adopted people would still adopt their behaviour to fit the perceived risk - more so if there were multiple peaks - so regardless of government action we aren't easily going to go back to the year as it looked before the coronavirus.
Presumably the BBC are waiting for those figures to be reported by whichever minister takes the podium for the daily briefing this afternoon.
Also absent from their live feed - the figures are from the ONS, so there is literally no need to wait for a minister to announce it if they are actually reporting news.
Does anyone here know what the difference in counting method is between UK and Italy since Reuters and the Guardian note the fact, but give no further information?
Does anyone here know what the difference in counting method is between UK and Italy since Reuters and the Guardian note the fact, but give no further information?
I *think* Italy is only counting those with a positive test result whereas the ONS includes all deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate, which includes some (particularly in care homes) where a test was not carried out.
There are two different reporting standards in play, that's all. There is the one used for daily reporting which used to use only hospital deaths - information collected daily by NHS. That standard was modified recently to add in non hospital deaths. I think that additional information about non hospital deaths came from the ONS, which reports weekly.
Currently, before today's report, the official UK total stands at just under 29,000. Whether there will be some further add in today of non hospital deaths on the basis of the ONS report remains to be seen. Something like that was done when the daily reporting standard was changed.
In any case, I don't know where cross country count comparisons aren't a matter of comparing apples and pairs. I don't know to what extent the Italian and Spanish counts include non hospital deaths.
Wait a few hours. There will probably be some further explanation at the briefing. I believe the ONS data, BTW. The ONS is transparent about both its methods and its reporting.
Presumably the BBC are waiting for those figures to be reported by whichever minister takes the podium for the daily briefing this afternoon.
Also absent from their live feed - the figures are from the ONS, so there is literally no need to wait for a minister to announce it if they are actually reporting news.
The 1pm News didn't include this news. But, they are reporting the really important stuff like the cancellation of Love Island.
I agree that comparisons between countries are problematic, as so many factors are involved, and gross comparisons tend to leave them out. This is why Sweden has become a bete noir, as you can use it to indict the UK, or you can indict it, next to Norway. This gets into fierce battles over lockdown versus no lockdown.
There are two different reporting standards in play, that's all.
...
Wait a few hours. There will probably be some further explanation at the briefing. I believe the ONS data, BTW. The ONS is transparent about both its methods and its reporting.
I am not debating the multiple reporting standards at play - and FWIW I believe the ONS figures are closer to the actual death toll. I'm querying the decision of public broadcaster not to give air to this -- which would seem a major story.
For comparison, their senior political editor was tweeting a picture of Johnson in a park holding a coffee earlier.
Arethosemyfeet's post probably gets to the root of the differences. If somebody dies in a care home who has never been tested and that person has pre existing conditions, what would a doctor put on the death certificate? If there's an outbreak in a home, a doctor might well add COVID-19 as a contributory cause. And perhaps be less cautious about doing that now. After all, if there had been no test, what does the doctor know for sure? And what is the correct professional judgment?
All the ONS can do it collate the reports on the death certificate. Including those which list more than one cause.
Arethosemyfeet's post probably gets to the root of the differences. If somebody dies in a care home who has never been tested and that person has pre existing conditions, what would a doctor put on the death certificate? If there's an outbreak in a home, a doctor might well add COVID-19 as a contributory cause. And perhaps be less cautious about doing that now. After all, if there had been no test, what does the doctor know for sure? And what is the correct professional judgment?
All the ONS can do it collate the reports on the death certificate. Including those which list more than one cause.
Which brings us back to why the Excess Mortality is the key measure....
I'm not surprised the BBC is waiting for the official figures and explanations. We'll see what the later news makes of the data.
The other thing that is definitely worth saying is that cross country comparisons, regardless of counting standard differences, are probably best done on a deaths as a percentage of population.
And finally, I am sure that more people have died in the UK because of the late lockdown. How many more is a matter of estimate but my own feel is a hell of a lot more.
I'm not surprised the BBC is waiting for the official figures and explanations.
The ONS produces official figures - figures produced by the ONS have been used any nymber of times as the basis of a Today interview which then gets riff-ed on over the course of the day.
Not to do so is a choice -- some might say a political one.
The other thing that is definitely worth saying is that cross country comparisons, regardless of counting standard differences, are probably best done on a deaths as a percentage of population.
I don't think percentage of population is very meaningful unless there is reason to believe the virus was completely unchecked. The spread of the virus in one city is unaffected by whether or not there are other cities in the same country.
If one country has a population of three million and has a hundred deaths, and another has a population of three hundred million and has five thousand deaths, then the smaller country was much better at getting the outbreak under control even if it had twice as many deaths per capita.
That said: a larger country all things being equal will have more international travellers and therefore proportionally more independent outbreaks. And the larger country will have more people travelling between major population centres so more super spreaders if it doesn't impose internal travel restrictions. But otherwise the per capita number is only relevant if the government completely failed to contain the outbreak.
Lots of chatter going on, that people are too afraid to break the lockdown. Damn right. I will need some convincing that it's safe out there. And the sight of Boris or Raab exhorting me, would be as inviting as a piranha. No doubt big business will be keen to reassure their low paid workers, that it's safe to go in the water - after you, sir.
What's going to happen is that protections for low-paid workers (unemployment, salary support etc.) are going to get taken away when governments decide that it's safe enough for sacrificial people to work.
It's just one factor, Dafyd. Population density is another, ease of transport, national isolation, specific reasons for hotspots, are yet others. The total numbers of deaths in a country does need to be qualified by some questions. What does that number tell us? Are we looking for government guilt, for example?
As a matter of curiosity, I remembered that the worldometer website gives you the means of sorting countries by deaths per million. So I did that
On that basis, and using a minimum cut off of a thousand total deaths for inclusion, the top 5 in order of deaths per million are Belgium (692), Spain (548}, Italy (481), UK (423), France (386). The USA (211) is currently 9th, after Netherlands, Sweden and Eire.
Matt Hancock criticised the “tone” of Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan, a serving A&E doctor, when she questioned the his strategy in tackling coronavirus on Tuesday.
Allin-Khan, the shadow mental health minister, told the Commons today the government’s testing strategy had “cost lives”.
“Frontline workers like me have had to watch families break into pieces as we deliver the very worst of news to them, that the ones they love most in this world have died,” she said.
“The testing strategy has been non-existent. Community testing was scrapped, mass testing was slow to roll out and testing figures are now being manipulated.”
Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting, who has been working in a hospital in her constituency during the coronavirus outbreak, added: “Many frontline workers feel that the government’s lack of testing has cost lives and is responsible for many families being unnecessarily torn apart in grief.”
Comments
You have a thinking injury. That makes the extra stress of this time extra hard on you. I don't envy you. I would strongly suggest that you take the advice of your medical/therapeutic advisors and go take care of your injury, as best you can, under these circumstances. There's not much I can do for you from here, except extend sympathy and hope for better days.
You'll have to judge for yourself whether continued participation on this thread is helping or harming you. I hope it's helping; I believe Shipmates mean well toward you, and perhaps other perspectives might be helpful in gaining clarity and coping. But if it isn't helping, go and take care of yourself as best you can in these circumstances.
With all that said, AIUI, the policy of the Ship is to offer no special quarter to those who identify themselves as having significant differences in thinking due to neurological differences or mental health issues.
So yes: you are missing the point. That weird story about the missionary sacrificing others for his beliefs puts you in the position of the missionary - making choices for others. How keen would you be to see your wife and child in the position of the 'others'? Do their lives not count? Even if you would cheerfully sacrifice your own life in order to return to Life Before, perhaps you might reconsider if you thought about those you love being sacrificed by others. If I said, "I would risk your child's life in order to return to my knitting club" I doubt you would find that either ethical or logical.
Hey, who are you to say Rand Paul can't go work out at the Senate gym just because he has COVID-19? Is it really fair to destroy Rand Paul's life forever just because he's infected with a highly contagious disease? Ha ha, just kidding! It's other people's lives which will be destroyed forever because of Rand Paul.
My health clinic is running 1:1 virtual Pilates sessions via Zoom, which works OK for me, but the osteopath who has also been treating me is very wary about re-opening.
I do have an appointment with him at the end of this month, but it is likely that PPE (if available!) will figure muchly, if, indeed, the appointment goes ahead.
Zoom by the way does not pass HIPA requirements in Canada (Health info and privacy acts).
Do you also make fun of people with back injuries?
Marvin the Martian has identified himself with having a specific type of injury. I don't think it's either compassionate or helpful to try to score points off unseen others with this kind of comment.
Since this is the case, I doubt anybody talking to you is going to do much good. We simply can't make the promise ("this will end on date X") that you want. Only God could do that.
So it becomes a question of managing your anxiety disorder. I both have one and live with someone else who has one, and during the pandemic, we are both way, way over the edge. But we have strategies and medication and instructions on when and how to use them. Do you?
Where do you get making fun from?
If the virus spreads from a hotspot, it will follow the people. The virus doesn't have its own transport.
So if some infected hotspot worker has a mother, boyfriend, or whatever in your vicinity, the virus will absolutely jump to you.
Plus there's the conundrum of testing. If my guesstimate that 4 out of 5 COVID-19 deaths in Virginia are going undiagnosed, what are the odds that limited testing resources (and American testing resources are frighteningly limited) are being diverted to known hotspots, leaving new hotspots to develop undetected?
Medication, yes. But all my strategies involved going other places. Which isn’t an option right now.
I don't think you are using the term "injured thinking" in the way I was using it. I was using to describe thinking that shows signs of diagnosable neurological difference (which I grant might not be in the category of injury) or mental health issues. I don't think denial or exaggeration are clear signs of disordered thinking, which were two aspects of thinking among 'right wing and libertarian' people you described.
In the circumstances of Marvin's posting, it seemed like a shitty generalization and/or a cheap shot. If I misread you, I apologize.
If you truly think that right wing and libertarian are showing a lot of injured thinking, in the sense of showing signs of diagnosable neurological difference and/or mental health issues, may I suggest starting another Purg thread about it? It's not an unknown opinion. One famous rant by comedian Rick Mercer included these impassioned questions: "What is WRONG with Conservatives? Were they not loved as children?" Certainly personality disorders get thrown around a lot in relation to right wing political leaders, Trump being the prime example of supposed narcissistic personality disorder.
I hear you, dude. Many of my happy places are currently unavailable. My anxieties are mostly about getting fat and flabby and missing important medical tests and physio appointments. I'm not going to list all the parts of my body that hurt. I nearly had a meltdown on Saturday trying to refill my prescriptions via telemedicine and I'm going to be a wreck on Wednesday because I have a yucky meeting. I used to be able to wash all my anxieties away in the pool and feel like a superhero at skate class. No more.
Others have commented on various false dichotomies presented in this thread. Here's a real one: adapt or die. And if there's one thing humans are good at, it is adapting.
Marvin, life changes constantly. If you had everything arranged just perfect, that's great, but it was never guaranteed to continue forever, virus or no virus. I've done several group therapy programs and we always spent part of the last session developing a personal plan for handling relapses. You're a smart person and a problem solver; you're capable of figuring this out. You might also want to do a little research on how people with disabilities define quality of life and learn what ableism is.
Barnabas62
Purgatory Host
Lest we forget:
Notably, in late February, the president said the spread of Covid-19 in the US was not inevitable and the danger to Americans “remains very low”. He predicted that the number of cases diagnosed in the country, just 15 that time, could fall to zero in “a few days”.
For the USA as in Canada, health care is licenced by the state, in Canada by the province. There are national umbrella organizations which provide guidance and advice but they don't legislate. I suspect you are right that some jurisdictions have not advised against Zoom; I know the situation in Canada. In my office, we started with Zoom the day of partial lockdown (14 March, full lockdown was 17March). The info re Zoom in mid-March was that it uses end-to-end encryption. But this has been shown to be false. Zoom uses a "shared key" for encryption. It is not end-to-end, although they said it was. The password and meeting ID are stored on servers, some of them in China. I can't find the link which started this off in Canada just now, but this one gives you the flavour: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/taiwan-zoom-video-conference-1.5524384 . This gives more details: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes
The next thing which happened for us locally is that the provincial health authority (runs the public health system) and university said it should not be used. then several regulatory bodies and private health care insurers provided the advice that it should not be used for confidential patient information. Note that licencing bodies here (elsewhere?) operate on a complaints basis. If the thing works and there's no complaint, no problem. However if there's a problem and complaint, it's very bad for the practitioner.
In my office, we have been forced to switch out. I don't think Zoom will return to medical and allied care, nor gov't where secret info is discussed. Its credibility is gone now. Sow e use Microsoft Teams and Doxy.me. The Sask Health Authority uses Pexip, which I suspect they use because they bought a mass licence. For non-confidential meetings where we just need to talk, Jitsi is okay- but no screen sharing. They operate like Zoom with shared keys but you can actually see what server is being used.
Over 50,000 new cases over the last two days and close to 3/4 of those outside the epicentres of New York and New Jersey. Serious/Critical cases steady for the moment at 16,000. Getting on for 200,000 new cases in the past week. And new cases will have already fed the epidemic before being diagnosed.
This really does look like very big risk time for experimental relaxation of controls.
Joining with mousethief as someone who would be very happy to eat his hat.
No, not an untimely death. MILLIONS of untimely deaths.
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1.
Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Russia and Turkey.
Bangladesh has joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
Our church happens to use Jitsi, partly because of the concerns you cite, but I have learned a lot about Zoom in recent weeks for business reasons, and I think many of your concerns are at the least outdated. Zoom 5.0 is being rolled out in the next few weeks and will be a mandatory upgrade after May 30. One of the things it does is let you configure which countries the servers you use are in - and amongst other reasons, HIPPA compliance is a big one.
The company certainly has a "move fast and break things" culture and was caught unawares by the massive growth in non-professional use due to covid-19. But in my view a lot of the complaints about Zoom are down to inexperienced users not using it appropriately. Perhaps not surprisingly, it uses Zoom for its own board meetings right now, so it must be reasonably sure it's secure...
/tangent
No one is talking about this current situation going on forever. Though I think something is missing in your analysis; even in a world where a much more lax approach to lifting the lockdown was adopted people would still adopt their behaviour to fit the perceived risk - more so if there were multiple peaks - so regardless of government action we aren't easily going to go back to the year as it looked before the coronavirus.
Also absent from their live feed - the figures are from the ONS, so there is literally no need to wait for a minister to announce it if they are actually reporting news.
https://theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/uk-coronavirus-death-toll-rises-above-32000-to-highest-in-europe
I *think* Italy is only counting those with a positive test result whereas the ONS includes all deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate, which includes some (particularly in care homes) where a test was not carried out.
See what Great Britain can achieve, when divorced from those Horrid Foreign People!
What a dire, and dismal, result, though - and it'll probably get worse before it gets better.
The Sick Man of Europe, indeed.
Currently, before today's report, the official UK total stands at just under 29,000. Whether there will be some further add in today of non hospital deaths on the basis of the ONS report remains to be seen. Something like that was done when the daily reporting standard was changed.
In any case, I don't know where cross country count comparisons aren't a matter of comparing apples and pairs. I don't know to what extent the Italian and Spanish counts include non hospital deaths.
Wait a few hours. There will probably be some further explanation at the briefing. I believe the ONS data, BTW. The ONS is transparent about both its methods and its reporting.
Is Extreme And Unbearable Outrage!
Quick! Bring on more Bread and Circuses, and all will be well...
I am not debating the multiple reporting standards at play - and FWIW I believe the ONS figures are closer to the actual death toll. I'm querying the decision of public broadcaster not to give air to this -- which would seem a major story.
For comparison, their senior political editor was tweeting a picture of Johnson in a park holding a coffee earlier.
All the ONS can do it collate the reports on the death certificate. Including those which list more than one cause.
Which brings us back to why the Excess Mortality is the key measure....
I'm not surprised the BBC is waiting for the official figures and explanations. We'll see what the later news makes of the data.
The other thing that is definitely worth saying is that cross country comparisons, regardless of counting standard differences, are probably best done on a deaths as a percentage of population.
And finally, I am sure that more people have died in the UK because of the late lockdown. How many more is a matter of estimate but my own feel is a hell of a lot more.
The ONS produces official figures - figures produced by the ONS have been used any nymber of times as the basis of a Today interview which then gets riff-ed on over the course of the day.
Not to do so is a choice -- some might say a political one.
If one country has a population of three million and has a hundred deaths, and another has a population of three hundred million and has five thousand deaths, then the smaller country was much better at getting the outbreak under control even if it had twice as many deaths per capita.
That said: a larger country all things being equal will have more international travellers and therefore proportionally more independent outbreaks. And the larger country will have more people travelling between major population centres so more super spreaders if it doesn't impose internal travel restrictions. But otherwise the per capita number is only relevant if the government completely failed to contain the outbreak.
What's going to happen is that protections for low-paid workers (unemployment, salary support etc.) are going to get taken away when governments decide that it's safe enough for sacrificial people to work.
As a matter of curiosity, I remembered that the worldometer website gives you the means of sorting countries by deaths per million. So I did that
On that basis, and using a minimum cut off of a thousand total deaths for inclusion, the top 5 in order of deaths per million are Belgium (692), Spain (548}, Italy (481), UK (423), France (386). The USA (211) is currently 9th, after Netherlands, Sweden and Eire.
She had a perfectly good tone! He needs to watch his attitude, his dishonesty and his privilege.
https://tinyurl.com/ybnfwgcj