Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[jayramfootball]

Need to do that here if people are still stupid enough to protest something that might save their lives

Oh dear.
Shoot people with rubber bullets in this country for protesting?
No.

[Goonerred]

Need to do that here if people are still stupid enough to protest something that might save their lives

Oh dear.
Shoot people with rubber bullets in this country for protesting?
No.

Protesters were throwing golf balls, bottles and batteries at the police.

[theHotHead]

HAhaha that was a full on meltdown.

Listen HotHead, I think you're a complete lunatic and It's clear this discussion bothers you, so let's just move on and ignore each others post in this thread. I'm sure we would find more common ground if we talked about something else so no hard feelings.

LOL, why, because I swore a bit

fookin 'ell laddie !

I just think you are a eejut, nothing anybody says or does to me on the internet bothers me .. its the "internet"

[theHotHead]

Hahahahhaaa

[theHotHead]

Police in Australia now firing rubber bullets and using pepper spray on people protesting lock downs.
Fascism.

Saw an article that said the Aussie government/police have banned media helicopters from flying/reporting on the protests fso as to not show the extent of the protests. People have inevitably used drones to show the scale of the protests

[theHotHead]

The Aussies thought they could beat Covid with lockdowns, but didn't understand how sneaky it is. Now they realise they have fcuked up royally and desperately trying to speed up the vaccine roll out. To date only 32% of the population have been fully vaccinated.

Whatever anyone thinks of our Government, one thing is certain.....their focus on the vaccines has worked well.

Well, to be fair, you guys have 135K thousand dead from Covid while Australia has only 1100. Wouldn't exactly call that f***ing up royally...

But you don't know how many of those were caused by Covid. Covid only needed to be "suspected" - not proven to be present for it to be mentioned on death certificates in England and Scotland, thats the reason I think the death numbers in he UK were so much higher than similarly sized countries in the West, before vaccine rollouts. This guidance was given on the NHS website, absolutely freekin bonkers ! Bullshit figures.

[theHotHead]

Need to do that here if people are still stupid enough to protest something that might save their lives

Oh dear.
Shoot people with rubber bullets in this country for protesting?
No.

I suspect Ach has links to the Gestapo ......

[Rockape]

Wouldn't it be funny if covid vaccine caused the mass sterilisation of the human race, that would stop the green house affect and global warming the extinction of the human race in the next little over a hundred years,
Good movie screen play there

............... it would mean being un-vaccinated, I'd have a hell of a lot of fkin to do.

Tough job but someone has to do it.

Once you’ve cloned yourself a few times, your job would be considerably easier!

[Angelito]

Accto the Daily Mail (caution!), only 30-35% of the Premier League players are vaccinated.

[LMAO]

Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos
Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin — but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.

David Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, calls the find “fascinating, and quite terrifying”.

The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square1. Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.

To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.

Natural origin
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.

“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.

Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2 related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.

In an extra step in their study, Eloit and his team showed in the laboratory that the receptor binding domains of these viruses could attach to the ACE2 receptor on human cells as efficiently as some early variants of SARS-CoV-2. The researchers also cultured BANAL-236 in cells, which Eloit says they will now use to study how pathogenic the virus is in animal models.

Last year, researchers described another close relative of SARS-CoV-2, called RaTG13, which was found in bats in Yunnan5. It is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 overall and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 40–70 years ago6. BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2, says Eloit — and all three newly discovered viruses have individual sections that are more similar to sections of SARS CoV-2 than seen in any other viruses.

Viruses swap chunks of RNA with one another through a process called recombination, and one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow. “These viruses recombine so much that different bits of the genome have different evolutionary histories,” he says.

Missing links
The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

The study also doesn’t clarify how a progenitor of the virus could have travelled to Wuhan, in central China, where the first known cases of COVID-19 were identified — or whether the virus hitched a ride on an intermediate animal.

Answers might come from sampling more bats and other wildlife in southeast Asia, which many groups are doing.

Another preprint, also posted on Research Square and not yet peer reviewed, sheds light on the work under way in China7. For that study, researchers sampled some 13,000 bats between 2016 and 2021 across China. But they did not find any close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and conclude that these are “extremely rare in bats in China”.

But other researchers question this claim. “I strongly disagree with the suggestion that relatives of SARS-CoV-2 may not be circulating in Chinese bats, as such viruses have already been described in Yunnan,” says Holmes.

The corresponding author of the study declined to respond to Nature’s questions about the findings, because the paper is still under review.

Wang says that both studies highlight the importance of ramping up sampling in regions outside China to help uncover the origins of the pandemic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

[Santi]

And yet here we are treating bats as a protected species you have to basically accommodate in your home...

[Rockape]

Glad I’m not in Australia:

Telegraph:

For an illustration of Australia’s zero-Covid doom-loop, take the father handcuffed in a Sydney park recently with his infant daughter in his lap, as police arrested him for not wearing a mask. Or the returning Olympians forced to quarantine for almost a month despite being double-jabbed and tested daily while in Tokyo. Or the dire warning for fans attending an Australian rules game in Adelaide “not to touch that ball” for fear of catching the virus.

Western Australia asked people to observe social-distancing while fleeing from bushfires
A country once celebrated for its subversive larrikin spirit has been paralysed for 20 months by the fantasy that it can insulate itself indefinitely from a global pandemic. Melbourne is about to become the most locked-down city on Earth, while a grieving mother from Queensland last month found herself trapped in New South Wales by state border closures after attending her son’s funeral. These are policies of extreme cruelty dressed up as virtuous protections of public health. And yet Australia, so cowed by Covid-19 that it will sanction government overreach into every sphere of society, is still desperate to host an Ashes series in 10 weeks’ time.

It is a contradiction rooted in cynical political calculation. Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, must face a federal election before next May, and by saving the Ashes, an occasion central to overseas prestige, he can create the illusion that his nation is once again ready to welcome the world. The reality is glaringly different: Queensland, due to host the first Test at the Gabba in December, is still imposing statewide lockdowns for single-figure caseloads. Western Australia, venue for the fifth and final Test, is so stricken by Covid terror that it has even asked its citizens to observe social-distancing while fleeing bushfires.

The consequences of such panic for England’s cricketers will be stark. At the very least, the touring arrangements this winter are likely to mandate hard quarantine and a ban on any social interaction beyond their bubble for the two-month series. According to Australian off-spinner Nathan Lyon, this is a “small price to pay”. But you can understand why England players, worn down by isolation fatigue and a Sri Lanka welcome party that involved being hosed down with disinfectant by men in hazmat suits, are already at breaking point. It is no wonder that all-format players such as Jos Buttler, Mark Wood and Chris Woakes are withholding judgment until learning whether their families can attend.

Australia’s fanaticism about biosecurity is inimical to hosting global sport. Cycling’s Tour Down Under has been called off only this week, while Formula One’s traditional curtain-raiser in Melbourne could yet be cancelled for the third straight season. This year’s Australian Open took place only because of an absurd two-tier quarantine system that ensured luxury for the superstars and lock-up for the rank-and-file. One justification for salvaging the Ashes amid these restrictions is to give Morrison, under mounting criticism for the country’s dismal vaccination rate, a timely electoral boost. But the England team deserve better than to be pawns in a self-serving political game.

As recently as Christmas 2019, Australia was looking to entice UK visitors through Kylie Minogue’s Mateship song, which produced the immortal couplet: “Negotiating trade deals is a shocker / But look, there’s a quokka!” Ever since, the pandemic has exposed a grimly isolationist streak in the national psyche, with one Sydney academic lamenting Australia’s reinvention as the “hermit kingdom of the South Pacific”.

For nearly two years, the entire population, contrary to all norms of international law, has been banned from leaving.

By the same token, caps on arrivals are so ludicrously low that tens of thousands of expatriates – including Australians wanting to return from India being threatened with five years’ jail – have been demonised for wanting to come back. Australia’s lockdown obsessives will not like to hear it, but there are ways of living with Covid that do not require this degree of punishment or control. This summer, England players have performed to full houses, with many of the infernal bubble protocols finally peeled back despite case numbers exceeding 35,000 a day.

Why would they willingly go back in time to Australia, where borders are slammed shut and basic freedoms can still be curtailed on the whim of state premiers drunk on their own power? Common sense dictates that this Ashes series should be delayed 12 months.

The unyielding harshness of Australia’s Covid strategy means that there is too great a risk of England sending a weakened team, an outcome that would do untold damage to the Ashes brand.

There is only so long that any athlete can be asked to tolerate incarceration and surveillance in the pursuit of sporting glory.

This country’s cricketers have already shouldered their fair share of the burden of Covid chaos.

They should not now be expected to pay the price for Australia’s reluctance to rejoin the rest of the world.

[VCC]

This may be miss information maybe you guys can inform or debate.
The current covid both 19 and delta, does the vaccine offer protection further than 6 months, i have been told and have not attempted to investigate myself that the jabs only have a short time frame of effectiveness ?.
If so i hear ? The jabs are not meant to be stockpilled on one other ?. Meaning boosters should not happen?.
So if this is correct what is going to happen when these effects wear off if peeps bodies do not form a defence and also if another variant happens which is highly likely?

[Rockape]

Delta is just one of the variants of COVID-19. All of the vaccines have varying results against the different variants and they all keep your immunity against infection for a lot longer than six months. In the UK they are planning to give booster jabs to the elderly at some stage but they will be from around 10 months from second vaccination.

[Power n Glory]

This may be miss information maybe you guys can inform or debate.
The current covid both 19 and delta, does the vaccine offer protection further than 6 months, i have been told and have not attempted to investigate myself that the jabs only have a short time frame of effectiveness ?.
If so i hear ? The jabs are not meant to be stockpilled on one other ?. Meaning boosters should not happen?.
So if this is correct what is going to happen when these effects wear off if peeps bodies do not form a defence and also if another variant happens which is highly likely?

In short, yes. The vaccine wanes after 6 months. Posted a couple of articles in this thread before.

News coming through of a pill going up for approval that should help stop people catching serious covid symptoms and reduce death rate.