Dr. Gonzo

No, big cities in the US aren’t on complete lockdown. Essential shops are open, a lot of businesses are claiming they’re essential though, but schools are closed. Where I am all gatherings of 10 or more are banned, NYC’s been more strict but they’ve got to be with how many cases they’ve got.

I don’t think you can have the economy working normally when you’ve just got bodies piling up in a corner.

Best thing about working from home has been spending my days with Cosmo. He’s unfortunately got a tumour on his thyroid (hopefully benign, it’s getting checked again soon - poor little guy has had so many medical tests lately). But he’s been happy I’m home

Look into golden retrievers or labradors. Smart dogs that are easily trained. They’re also friendly as fuck and just generally great dogs. Dogs are fantastic companions and great animals with a lot of love to give. Owning one is a commitment to that dog for it’s entire life, so picking one that suits your lifestyle is very important. Because otherwise it’s not fair to the animal, who’ll basically be loving you unconditionally. If you’re getting a dog you’ve got to be all in on giving it the best life possible, so it’s not something to be taken lightly.

Huskies are famously difficult to train, if you’ve never had a dog before that might not be the best one to start with.

Tbf Iceland are a bunch of confusing wankers naming their country after those shops

Trump wants to have America prematurely stop locking down because he’s scared the stock market being low will hurt him in the election. They’re both trying to reduce panic for the sake of their economies. It’s just harder for Trump when there’s been such a rapid spread in the US. The brain squad in Mississippi says they won’t be having any sort of lockdown because they’re not China. I assume that’s because China’s got a form of an education system and has experienced economic growth in the last 30 years. I don’t know how restricting domestic travel in the US works, but preventing locked down states from having travelers from states operating as though there’s no pandemic might be wise

I've heard from people I know that live in Iran that what we've heard about how bad it is in Iran (and it's bad there, by all accounts) is just a fraction of how bad it really is there. Governments that need to project power for their propaganda necessary to maintaining harsh authoritarian rule over their people are exactly the sort you can't trust to be honest about how bad things ever are under their watch. And China and Iran both fall into those types of countries.

He’s a snake and he attacked Joe Gomez. He’s at the right club.

Eating bats in China happens in rural places, but not so much in places like Wuhan (which is a pretty big city). But bats do live around Wuhan. But their food safety regulations are pretty much non existent compared to EU food safety regulations which the UK’s still following for the time being. I think officials in Wuhan ruled out the disease coming from their live animal markers, but who knows. Maybe it came from someone eating a bat or a pangolin, maybe one of the bats around Wuhan bit someone. Hating Chinese people for this though is 100% racist. You can hate their government for hiding it for a month, or not shutting China down faster... but I think Western governments not taking this seriously until they were dealing with it are just as good targets for our blame. Governments all around the world come off as pretty shit in the wake of this

Seen some article where Raheem the snake talks about a possible return to us and quite frankly that’s disgusting. He’s at the right club for someone of his moral character, only PSG or Barca could be more fitting. Hope he gets more abuse from our fans to get the notion of ever playing for us ever again out of his head

Same, but I've been very bored.

I am not sure what your argument is here. Are you arguing that countries looking to limit the spread of an infectious disease wouldn't want to limit air traffic from a country that's suffering from an outbreak? Because you mentioned that Europe and the USA have it worse because of leadership, complacency and air traffic... wouldn't you want a South American country to focus on limiting the number of potentially infected people coming into the country. I don't think poor leadership and complacency have only been issues in Europe or the US either - I think that most world governments have let the human race down in handling this. Yes, the virus spreads if there's un-isolated members of the public. But it'll also spread quicker if you add more infected people into the country's population, even if you isolate infected people who are already there. The idea right now is for people to slow the spread of the infection, so we don't all see what we've seen in Italy where you've got a big spike in the number of cases that overwhelms hospitals. This is the whole idea of "flattening the curve" that you might keep hearing about if you've been keeping up with the story. I also don't get how you get the conclusion that the virus coming from China had nothing to do with air traffic. It happened right before their biggest travel season, the Lunar New Year, which meant most of China (and Asia, tbh) was traveling. And as that holiday got extended, some people traveled all around the fucking world with the virus. I think it's a bit silly to be praising or criticising El Salvador's response. Yeah, they've managed to impose curfews pretty quickly. They've also managed to piss off neighbors like Mexico by accusing Mexico of trying to send coronavirus their way. Which when you've got a global crisis that's probably going to take the world working together to really address properly, maybe worsening ties with your neighbor isn't the greatest fucking idea.

For COVID? Or Spanish flu? Because the first case of Spanish flu was recorded in the US. But yeah for this COVID, it pretty clearly seems to have originated in China.

Spanish Flu’s only called that because Spain’s media, unlike most big European countries in that era, wasn’t under blackout from WW1 because they were neutral. So most sources first reported were out of Spain, but there’s evidence that other countries had cases first where the stories were suppressed & that governments were happy to let Spain take the fall on the world stage.

Not in the US! But that’s where McDonalds is fighting to not give workers paid time off to sick workers during this time and encouraging every one of their workers to show up.

The most shocking thing of this scandal is they knew since January how bad this could get. Yet they reassured the public it wouldn’t get this bad, all while knowing what was likely coming. Some didn’t just sell their stocks, but also told their wealthy donors (aka their masters) this might get bad. I’m typically against capitol punishment, but using political office for financial gain while misleading the public of a pandemic is unforgivable. And I doubt there’s any rehabilitating someone lacking in any morality whatsoever. People will die because they kept quiet about it in January while they were selling their stocks. Seems fair if they get the death penalty imo.

This senator insider trading story in the US gets a little more juicy: the head of the NYSE was married to one of these criminal politicians: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyse-jeffrey-c-sprecher-kelly-loeffler-sold-company-stock-ahead-of-coronavirus-market-meltdown/# Rampant political corruption during times of a pandemic is arguably the most American thing ever

Apparently that’s been killing people following the online advice of fake doctors.

A few weeks ago I felt the same, but 31 and a former cigarette smoker. Was out for about 3 days but by day 4 I was back to feeling like normal. I did worry about it being coronavirus but stopped worrying once I felt better. Nobody else I know has had the same symptoms though. Hard to say really, with so much unknown about the virus. Since last Friday though I’ve been doing my best to just stay at home as much as I can though.

The US response is crazy. The healthcare providers are woefully inequipped for this... so a shitload of government spending is going to go towards bailing out the airline industry and the cruise industry. Why bail the fucking cruise industry out? Let that stupid industry fucking die. Why are these companies more important than the number of people who are likely to get sick?

Iran’s got it pretty fucking bad tbh

@Inti Brian, considering that the world’s healthcare systems will be put under enormous strain, what would you prefer. Canada or Peru?

No, I think the response has been poor from the get go and that’s why we’re looking at a pandemic. If there was intelligence of a worldwide outbreak in January from “the leader of the free world,” you’d expect that leader of the free world to adopt a more serious stance earlier on. And as the leaders of the free world, that stance sort of shapes the stance of the west. I can’t just help but think that in countries where Rupert Murdoch’s got a heavy influence in public opinion, you’ve got world leaders turning a criminally blind eye to what’s happening. The UK’s stats are eerily similar to Italy’s right now compared to when Italy first started having cases. And as an immigrant to the US, it seems weird to me that my state govt seems several steps ahead of the actual government. Which doesn’t seem right since the US govt was the one with more advanced notice of how bad this could be. World leaders have been a disgrace with handling this, a lot of people will die as a result