My friend in the UK swears by this and believes it totally, says the whole covid 19 thing is rubbish
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Sure hope this sticks.
- Contact sports – only for training
Got a notice from the hockey club. Things are moving 
Contact sports – only for training.
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I don’t understand that. I mean if you’re training you might as well go all out and play games too?
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I already have my hair appointment for the first sat in july 
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Non-contact sports can play full games. I guess they just want your team to get covid-19, but not spread it to other teams… /shrug
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Now here is a F**** up tale for you. This morning I get a phone call from my daughter’s school (government school) telling me I must pick her up, she is feeling sick. Ok, off I go. When I get there the headmaster tells me that because my daughter had been coughing last week Thursday and she is nauseous now, I have to get her tested for covid 19 or she cannot return to school.
Now I have to dig out R850, book a time slot with Ampath and get her tested.
Can you imagine every parent of a kid who has the flu has to go through this now.
Oh well, the new normal and all that.
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Oh its absolutely retarded. And every teacher that gets tested positive now has the school close down (fortunately its usually over a weekend) for a few days while whole school gets re sanitized.
I mean, cmon…
the teachers are also being told the same thing. If they’re showing symptoms they need to pay out of pocket.
All that is happening now? Noone is honest on those little forms…hell I don’t even sign one anymore at the 1 school… They literally have someone there that pre-ticks the yes yes yes, no stuff for you. What a joke this entire screening thing is…
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These are actually encouraging stories. It takes one teacher or kid to infect a whole class, or even a whole grade or school, then those kids carry the virus back to their parents and grandparents who are at much greater risk of getting seriously ill.
There’s a lot of “COVID-19 is just a bit of a more serious flu” or even “COVID-19 is just like flu” false equivalences doing the rounds. Don’t fall for that stuff. Listen to doctors and nurses treating actual COVID patients, listen to survivors, listen to people who have lost loved ones to the virus.
I can post examples here of people’s testimonies (testimonials?) if y’all are interested, but I don’t want to be a downer.
I’ll leave this one example here which I found recently, which has been enlightening: The other side of COVID-19 - interview with South African survivor
Listen “between the lines”, as it were. This guy was one of the earliest cases of COVID-19 in South Africa. He received an incredible amount of personal attention, which helped him pull through. What happens when the ICUs / critical care facilities get too full for that kind of personal attention?
As a parting shot, SensePost’s Dominic White articulated the advice I’ve tried to give people really well:
Best lockdown advice I got kicked in today, it was from a mate who’s ex-military. He said “at some point you or your crew are going to be so sick of it you’ll no longer care about the danger and just want to get out - prepare for that and shut it down”
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That is a good point. It is unfortunate that it is also flu season and kids are going to get sick all over the place.
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Yeah it sucks. The Northern hemisphere is lucky there. They get to head into summer for their COVID epidemic peak.
I’m reminded of something Prof Abdool Karim said regarding one the reasons lockdown was extended…
There was no way to shorten the period to get to South Africa’s COVID epidemic peak without overloading our hospitals. So we had to “flatten the curve” to give our healthcare sector time to prepare, but that also means pushing out the epidemic peak, which projections indicated would end up coinciding with our annual flu epidemic peak.
One of the reasons for extending the lockdown was to push out our COVID epidemic peak so that it would not coincide with our flu peak, but that also means there is going to be some overlap.
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The only thing that worries me, those numbers highlighted - those numbers are still so low.
" Donald Trump told thousands of supporters on Saturday that he had asked US officials to slow down testing for Covid-19 because case numbers in the country were rising so rapidly."
Best way to flatten the curve, apparently, is to do less testing. Crazy world with leaders like that
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What if “its not so serious” is being said to me by doctors?
Coz thats what I’m getting. When you compare this virus to TB or malaria, this is nothing… TB killed 63000 people in South Africa in 2018 (am unable to find 2019 data). That’s 5000 on average a month.
People die…its sad…but until the doctors in my immediate circle get concerned, I’m gonna trust them. They’ve been right so far
The precautions are also laughable. I’m told (again by a GP) testing negative is not actually confirmation you DON’T potentially have it and are spreading it. They also say there is NO point in testing unless you are actually symptomatic. We ALL know those temp thingies are joke (i couldnt get it to show me as over 30 degrees yesterday, they just waved me on).
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Your doctors are idiots. If my dad gets COVID-19 then he probably won’t make it. He is a cancer survivor, over 60 years old and he had a heart attack during his surgery for his cancer. He has now been cancer free for a while but COVID-19 kills people like him.
You mention TB. TB is a completely treatable and curable disease. That’s the big difference between TB and COVID-19.
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And yet more people die from that, and its not considered a pandemic. Isn’t that proving my point? 
edit: please don’t misread these posts as me saying “its not serious at all and we should all run around naked and catch it”. I’m well aware that it is definitely serious to certain demographics, especially the elderly or those with compromised immune systems… I’m not insensitive to that…just wanna puut that out there
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Unfortunately I don’t have the time to debate with you right now. To me it makes logical sense.
Maybe I’ll get time tonight to explain why COVID-19 is handled the way it is.
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I’m happy to read what you send and discuss it, as long it doesn’t become heated and we stay friendly
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Pfft I will destroy you and eat you for breakfast.
Mortality (death) rates determine the frequency of deaths in a specified population during a specified interval of time. With a novel disease like COVID-19, however, mortality rates are unreliable at this point in time due to a variety of factors. The COVID-19 mortality estimate may be unknown as we do not know exactly how many cases there are. This is due to underreporting and people with minimal or mild symptoms not being tested, and therefore not being factored into the total number of confirmed cases. This subsequently makes mortality estimates difficult. Some reports estimate mortality rates for COVID-19 anywhere from 1.5 to 20 percent, 20 percent being one of the highest estimates at the centre of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. In contrast, untreated TB has an average mortality rate of 45 percent. However TB is not only preventable but treatable, and the global success rate reported by the WHO for those who started TB treatment in 2018 was 85 percent.
Thus, TB, if untreated, is technically deadlier than COVID-19, though one must consider the diseases themselves and other risk factors: age, HIV status, the quality of the body’s immune systems, etc. Up to 50% of people with active, untreated TB disease may die, much more than even the highest projected mortality estimates for COVID-19, making it critical to address prevention and treatment options for TB. The advantage for TB is that we do have treatments that work, including for drug-resistant forms of TB. We also have treatments for the TB infection stage to prevent a person from becoming unwell with TB. Currently there is no proven treatment for COVID-19 except supportive treatment, however there are many trials underway.
The big difference between TB and COVID-19 is that it’s both preventable and treatable.
Although data for SARS-CoV-2 are still emerging, early data indicate that the reproduction number (R0) is 2.2. This means that each person with COVID-19 can pass the infection on to an additional 2.2 individuals.
The R0 value for TB in low-incidence countries is below 1; there may be little chance of infecting others and no TB outbreaks take place. However, in low-income settings with a high TB burden, the R0 value for TB has been as high as 4.3 in China (2012) and 3.55 in Southern India (2004 to 2006). The R0 value for TB is also variable as it is affected by other factors, such as environmental conditions and the health of population. So in settings with more TB in general, crowded living conditions and risk factors, such as malnutrition and HIV infection, contribute to a higher R0 value.
TB won’t cause the hospitals to overflow. The rate of infection with COVID-19 is the big problem. It’s extremely infectious. If left unchecked then chances are we will all get it. Chances of us all getting TB is slim to none. I don’t have to go to the shops and worry that I will get TB. Because in our neighbourhoods it’s mostly in check.
And in the small likelihood that we do get infected then we can go get treated by a doctor.
If you get COVID-19 and you are one of the unlucky people who it affects badly then you are screwed.
That’s a short rundown of why COVID-19 is treated the way it is. Especially in comparison to TB in 2020.
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mmm breakfast…
So TB is completely treatable and curable… while also being quite infectious… and yet still killed 63000 people in our country in a year without any uprising from our hospitals (we here in EC have many TB patients in our wards), more than what a up-till-now uncurable covid-19 has done with higher infection rates. To me that is numerical proof that covid is less harmful to our general population than TB (something your piece above seems to agree with as well). What am I missing regarding the numbers? You also admit the mortality rates of Covid (similar to TB) are uncertain, due to the unknown (but agreed-upon that its high) variable that a large portion of the population are asymptomatic or show minimal signs of having it and that is highly likely way more people have it and get over it than the active cases are showing (which therefore would lower the relative/total lethality of it). This can be further seen by that percentage of active cases vs deaths from Covid dropping as testing globally has become more aggressive.
(taken from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ )
EDIT: since I either missed the bottom of your post or you edited it afterwards while i was writing the above, gotta add this:
Agreed 100%. The stats I’m being told by the doctors in my area are quite rough. Not a single person that they’ve had to put on a ventilator has actually survived. So if you’re bad enough that they need that equipment, its not good…
Again I’m not saying that this is a case of the sniffles, it is incredibly dangerous to certain demographics who I would 100% advise to needing to take extra precautions, and I’m happy to take precautions on their behalf to try minimize their risk to me (if thats worded right, i mean the chance they get it from me without me knowing). I’m saying to a large percentage (91.32% and rising is the number as of writing, and we agree this is a ceiling number as there are unknown numbers of ppl who get it and show no symptoms and aren’t “counted”) this is not as “world-ending” as we were led to believe…remember those fake pics or central park with bodies being stored there?
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