Should work like it did before, but then opening up again will probably cause the same spike.
Hopefully there’s a vaccine coming.
No need to be sorry. My family has done very well and it’s easier to get by when you are a white muslim in the US plus we had a few family members here before us which helped. All of my family wasn’t affected by the conflict over there, a couple of my dads uncles fought in WW2 in the area (one passed away last year at 101 and the other is still doing well at 98) where we live but we have been very lucky compared to a lot of people in the region
When I go in the summer it is usually in the high 80s, not very humid but the sun is strong. Our house over there is about 30 minutes from the adriatic sea so being in the sun is enjoyable especially in the salt water. I went white water rafting in the Tara River 2 years ago and you can find skiing 5 hours from the shores on the other side of the country in the winter time. The country is so amazing when it comes to scenery and weather. Where my grandparents are it might snow an inch or 2 twice a year, this is mostly a recent occurrence because before 5 years ago it almost never snowed in the winter ( global warming), low temps are in the low 40s usually
Sorry for derail but my extended family is extremely disappointing right now
3 Likes
Nice. Highest point in Montenegro is 8274 feet. So, it’s like Southern California (where I am). At the beach and not too far from mountains just about that high. (Skiing at Big Bear not too far away is a little over 8k feet) And Montenegro is just a little bigger than LA County.
Yeah, the problem is that all viruses have a balancing act between not causing symptoms and being transmissible. Ideally, viruses would like to cause no symptoms at all, but they’d also like to have the host churn out massive quantities of new virus and behave in a way that helps spread the virus. For respiratory viruses, it’s partly that causing symptoms can be a means of helping spread the virus, and partly it’s just hard to make a host body churn out piles of virus in lung cells without causing any lung pathology at all.
For a lethal disease, COVID is already remarkably mild in most cases. Influenza has been around a long time and isn’t nearly as stealthy as COVID, so it’s not clear to me that there’s much pressure on the virus to be more unobtrusive. There’s not really any pressure at all on the virus to not kill people, the virus doesn’t really care whether a fraction of a percent of people die at the end of the disease process or not. Humans wouldn’t bother so much with countermeasures if the virus were less lethal but there’s a catch-22 problem here; for us to recognise that a new variant is less lethal, it has to be widespread enough for us to figure that out, and there’s no selection pressure to enable the new variant to be more widespread until we figure it out.
The problem is that in the face of lockdowns and other countermeasures, there’s immense selective pressure on the virus to become more transmissible, so anything that makes it milder is right out if it negatively affects transmissibility, and frequently there is that tradeoff. For example, decreased viral load would probably be nice in terms of making people less sick, but it’s a total non-starter because of the pressure to be transmissible. I’m afraid we’re more likely to see selection in the other direction. We already saw the D614G mutation arise several times independently. I think it’s pure luck that this mutation managed to increase transmission without apparently making people any sicker. The new variant could kill twice as many people and that wouldn’t have been a problem at all in terms of it propagating itself around the globe.
6 Likes
Very similar to California. You can grow some good grapes and range of fruit and vegetables that can be grown is great, the pomegranates and peaches are my favorite but so many great choices
Edit: can’t forget to mention the olive oil, we always bring some back in our luggage when we go visit
3 Likes
I went on a tour of the area around Budva in Montenegro, it was just this English guy who had moved there and started taking people to random cool places he liked. Like we walked down off the road into this hidden valley where there was a farming family living, isolated from everyone. Had some of their goat cheese and prosciutto and whatnot. It was a good time.
Montenegro has imo the best anthem in the world.
4 Likes
Trump stopped the Mexican rapists with his big, beautiful wall. STRENGTH!
How could I forget such a thing as an imaginary wall? Damn.
Cool animation showing covid deaths vs other causes world wide.
5 Likes
I’m guessing the plan was to get people to start freaking out about the caravan in mid to late September.
the relax part in Israel was an utter shitshow. People claimed “corona is dead” and there were literally no guidelines whatsoever.
In general the way COVID was handled in Israel is kinda fascinating, but I’m biased.
1 Like
Yeah while Israel is obviously scary as shit there are also tons of other countries like Germany, SK, Japan etc who have shown you can open up without a shit show. So we know its possible.
Not in the US though because Trump is a stone cold moron. I agree if he had just come out and told his cult members to wear masks, done the right things etc we would have super high mask compliance and he’d be a lock for re-election.
1 Like
All of those places have seen outbreaks since reopening and have had to partially shut down again.
This thing probably isn’t going to disappear without an effective vaccination programme. Until then it’s a matter of living alongside it and adapting to it.
Seems important so reposting Chris’s post to rescue it from the poker win rate derail.
Yeah no doubt but its possible to keep it under control and their partial shutdowns aren’t really that bad imo. And their economies seem to be doing fine as well.
Also seems like a vaccine is pretty likely within a year.
1 Like
Germany has entered recession, and as it’s by far the biggest economy in Europe the outlook for the continent is bleak until it picks up.
5 Likes
This site does estimates for individual states, including comparisons to previous months. Really would love to see this sort of detail for other countries.
The changes over the past 90 days are, uh, not encouraging.