RSAC branded a 'super spreader event' as attendees share COVID-19 test results Quick show of hands: who came home from this year's RSA Conference without COVID-19? The cybersecurity event's organizers say they're not keeping count of attendees who say they've been hit with the coronavirus. Meanwhile, a growing number of folks have taken to Twitter to post photos and reports of positive test results after …
> However, 39.9 percent said they were unsure, for whatever that means.
I'd guess that since the conference didn't end until the 9th June, some people could still be unsure since the COVID-19 incubation period is still listed by the WHO as being on average 5-6 days but with outliers up to 14 days. So if it ended last week, there might still be new cases for another week yet.
Sadly, its a fearful author. I'm pretty sure it means that 39% didn't get tested because, oddly enough they didnt bleed from the eyes and die in 2 hours.
'Consider yourself forewarned.'
Thanks for the fearful warning but, masks, certificates of vaccination, social distancing, proximity alert apps, wearing gloves and bubble rollers won't help. Only never being around people again is safe. Consider yourself forewarned.
Remember... paranoia is a state of preparation.
Oh dear, "badflorist" has managed to go about two years without gaining a clue.
Masks, vaccination certificates, social distancing all DO help. They are not perfect, and it is a common dishonest ploy (frequently employed by people who don't want to be mildly inconvenienced even if it prevents people getting sick) to loudly infer that those actions provide some kind of absolute degree of "safe".
It is quite true that none of the steps mentioned make you safe. It is quite false to imply that they don't make you safer.
And, of course, the safer each individual is, the safer the whole population becomes...
Ok, so nothing makes you completely safe (not even the vaccine, that I remember being told would give 95% protection against serious illness) - but surely a balance has to be struck somewhere?
There is danger in all aspects of life, and it may well be that humanity is doomed anyway - if our population keeps growing then something will come and get us in the end, be it war, famine, other kinds of pestilence etc. Or just plain old Death: If I am covid-positive but have no symptoms, and I am hit by a bus, then I would still count as a covid death. I think that quirk of the reporting may be behind some of the recent claims that "omicron killed more people than delta" for example.
If 50% of the population have covid then (approximately) 50% of all deaths will be covid deaths, even if nobody died from covid. And this is especially true if (even non-deadly or vaccine-protected variants of) covid is present in places where people usually go to die, such as hospitals and care homes.
I think your arguments (that we should all be as safe as we possibly can be) are very similar to those around Nuclear Power. It is not possible to reduce the risk to zero, but if we double or treble the time and cost of each plant by mandating hyper-redundant safety systems, core-poisoning shutdown systems etc, (or by banning new builds altogether and/or closing existing ones) then we can marginally reduce the safety risk.
After all that, we find that other things have killed us, i.e. carbon emissions, particulates, and, ironically, airborne radioactivity, from burning coal and oil.
How safe is "safe enough" for you? When can we have our lives back? Or would you have us sat in our basements wearing masks on zoom calls for evermore?
You wrote that if we take extra precautions then "then we can marginally reduce the safety risk". The following example will show just how wrong you are...
Google suggests that Taiwan is about 7 times smaller than the UK (in terms of land mass) and has 2.7 times fewer people, thus Taiwan has a population density that is about 2.6 times that of the UK. Since COVID is more easily spread in a denser population, we might expect that the per-capita COVID infection/death rate in Taiwan would be higher than that in the UK.
I suggest you look at the following web page: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
Look at the "Total Coronavirus Deaths in Taiwan" chart in its logarithmic form. Then compare it to the same chart for the UK at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
Taiwan is next door to China, so it was much closer to the original source of infection, yet Taiwan implemented very comprehensive preventative measures, and had only 12 deaths by 13 May 2021 (almost one and a half years since the start of the pandemic). In contrast, the UK had 128,262 deaths by the same date, which is almost 4000 times the per-capita rate of Taiwan. Unfortunately, since then Taiwan has had two significant outbreaks (both of which have been smaller than similar outbreaks in the UK), so its per-capita death rate is "only" 12.7 lower than that of the UK (despite having a higher population density).
Ok, so are you saying that we should continue to ban public gatherings (China style), and damn the economic consequences for the hospitality, events, travel & other service sectors (which make up the bulk of the UK economy) in the face of a recession and spiralling inflation?
Not at all. Taiwan and China are different countries and have used different tactics to tackle the pandemic. A google search for "Taiwan COVID economy impact" yielded the following article, which provides interesting reading: https://www.economicsobservatory.com/how-has-taiwan-navigated-the-pandemic. Of particular note that is that effective measures to keep the pandemic under control actually helped the economy.
Taiwan and China are very similar economies in that their main economic driver is export goods, not services. The UK economy is mainly services and very little export. (yes I agree this needs to be fixed, but you are not being realistic if you think this can change on the scale of years - it takes decades, even if we could find something that we could export competitively ...)
But, surely you must realise, that our service-based economy is impacted much more by covid-fear than Taiwan's export-based economy. Taiwan mostly produce computer chips that already come out of clean-rooms and heavily automated factories ... Economically speaking at least, it is Much easier for them to weather the storm of covid.
I live in the UK. My wife and son were visiting friends in Taiwan when the pandemic first made the news, and she got to see first hand how Taiwan responded to the threat. Then when she returned home a few weeks' later she got to compare Taiwan's tactics to tactics used in the UK. One Taiwanese newspaper article at the time mentioned that the government had (if memory serves me correctly) about 140 specific tactics to hinder the spread of the virus. The government had these tactics planned in advance due to the country's previous experience with SARS. In contrast, the UK (and many other countries) employed just a handful of tactics, which is why the per-capita COVID infection/death rate in most countries was massively higher than in Taiwan.
It has nothing to do with the types of economy in a country (if it had, then the COVID infection rate in Taiwan would have been as high as that in China).
Well, one has to factor in that the quick tests are pretty... well... insensitive to the current strain (though manufacturers might have reacted finally), so a negative test does not mean you are negative (unfortunately). On the other hand, the lower virus count this might indicate as well (in addition to being symptom free) makes you a tad less likely to spread the stuff. But then the current strains are even more effective at infecting others (symptoms seem to be - on average - less severe, though I do have some colleagues who finally caught it - not in the office - and they do/did feel really sick).
So, I think the numbers are likely to be quite a bit higher, but there is no way to know it. The conditions, tons of people in closed rooms, all breathing the same air, which is agitated to keep aerosols afloat and actively distribute them through the whole centre, were pretty effective for spreading SARS CoV 2...
"What happens in 'Frisco stays in 'Frisco" ???
San Francisco (city government area) has a population of 874,000, most of whom are unmasked, and it's not a super-spreader event. Attending large well-ventilated conference halls unmasked like everyone else isn't a superspreader event.
it's a superspreader event among those who came and get hammered in bars.
It's a super spreader event among those who sat in crowded rooms together, breathing the same air... yes, bars might have been involved, but not all rooms in the Moscone Center are huge (especially in M-North and South, though it depends on how htey did set them up, I recall the rooms in M-West to be quite flexible, ceilings are also higher there... I think).
For reasons, conference rooms generally have very high air refresh rates.
--- and the people who attend or run bars and restaurants feel the same way about COVID as the Portuguese shore fishermen and the Great Banks fishing fleet felt about the 'myth of overfishing'. Can't be us. Must be everything else.
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