Coronavirus in the UK

There's open mindedness and then there is gullibility.

Stories like the one you posted are designed to hook the gullible and they are designed to be re-posted by the gullible all over the internet, viral spread of misinformation sowing seeds of hatred across the world.

Grab a paragraph from that drivel and paste it into Google's search box, then look at the quality of the sites that you get results from.

I agree but with a caveat.

These kind of stories are written by bad actors on the net, by that I mean people engaged in information warfare or rather disinformation and by people who are looking to drive traffic through their websites for the purpose of getting enough advertising clicks to make a quick buck.

That's just a couple of reasons other sites use this to draw people into places where they are likely to click on some kind of malware designed to hijack their computers for criminal purposes.

A Botnet infection on a PC might only manifest itself as a slow computer, but meanwhile your computer and your electricity bill are working for someone else who is using a distributed network of millions of bots usually for criminal purposes.

This kind of story is deliberately engineered these days, I mean god knows there have always been conspiracy theories, humans just love them, but these are now the deliberate spreading of misinformation.

Malcolm I have never wanted to censor people in this place, neither do Dom or Rob, personally I would prefer if you removed it but you probably can't after the changes I made some months ago.

The problem with this kind of stuff is that it means we start turning up somewhere in those search results as well, that's what the man from Bohol was doing deliberately poisoning this place he wasn't doing that in public in his other forum, I am not suggesting that you are doing anything like that, I realise that you think it is a valid opinion.

Ah but that is the problem, time won't tell, the reason that it is a conspiracy theory is that it is non falsifiable, the people that believe it can make up anything they want to support their ideas and they generally do.

Also for information Malcolm.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals a US company designed a vaccine in 3 hours using computational biology after they got their hands on the first genome sequences back on January 9th.

How long will it take to make, 12 to 18 months if we are lucky and that's assuming it actually works.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/ino...avirus-could-be-ready-by-years-end-2020-03-05

It is about the numbers of patients at any one moment, it is about hospitals being totally unable to cope, it is about Ice Rinks being used as mortuaries and Conference Centres being turned into field hospitals and the supply of high tech ventilators to keep those who need intensive care alive.

If we can't cope with the number of cases we have then people who would have lived with ICU care will die and people who might have got by with less intensive treatment will also die.

12% of ALL infections need hospital care, that's 1 in 9 who could potentially die, that's what is currently coming out of Italy, you've seen the pictures from Italy surely.

You seem to be advocating that we should all relax and go back to normal, and I can't fathom that, it's obvious that the health care systems around the world can't cope.

I know that's why I am a bit aghast

Yeah I agree.

It's really people just trying to find some way to be social in the midst of a social lockdown and it's a bit of copy thy neighbour given the similar spontaneous events on the continent.

As an aside, I went out this morning at 8am to get supplies, first time outside my door in 6 days and Morrisons had Marshals who were controlling the queue of about 40 groups of people (couples I guess) trailing back around the car park, yes keeping 2 metre distance but looking at the queue and the potential time one would have been having to maintain that distance I parked my trolley and went back to the car and then round to Home Bargains where I managed to get some eggs, some bread and the most important thing chocolate well and a couple of bottles of Sauvingon Blanc as well

Home Bargains was very quiet no queues no Marshals but a lot of people not obeying the keeping their distance rule, I must have looked like a hugely overweight Mohamed Ali as I floated like a butterfly back and forth to maintain the spacing, and I will probably have done myself no favours doing that, this 2 metre rule is really only a guideline the reality is that you will be walking through the air that people are breathing in and out and no distance is really safe.

As I could not get everything I needed in Home Bargains I went over to Lidl and it was worse there, very few people keeping distance and one bloke in front of me was stockpiling booze, he got away with buying 14 bottles of wine as well as stockpiling large numbers of other items, he didn't even have the bags to carry it all out of the store.