The Virus Outbreak Thread

@Zincy  
Goddamn religious nuts.

@Zincy  
The vaccine is like Jesus healing the leapers. The Republican Party is like the Pharisees telling him not to do that and coming up with excuses for why it’s somehow evil.

Booster shots have begun to become widely available. Though I think only the Pfizer one is currently FDA approved, with Moderna expected to get the Okay soon.
 
Apparently thought experts actually don’t recommend it unless you are in a high-risk category (65 or older, compromised immune system, etc). Anyone not at high-risk are as-of-right-now neither encouraged or discouraged to get it; there’s just no rush since the initial vaccination is still showing an effective enough deterrent.
 
They still say you must get that initial vaccination anyway though. Weird flex but okay.

I’m gonna get a booster shot ASAP.

@Dustcan
 
Especially Moderna, which is absolutely killing it out there. Some estimates keep it at 92% effectiveness even with the variants.

@Zincy  
That’s the one I got.

@Zincy
 
That’s reassuring as I got that one.
 
Still plan to get a booster soon-ish when I can.

@Dustcan
 
Same, once it’s available I’ll get mine. My folks will be the first to get it, once they open Moderna up. They’re both disabled vets and both work for the government (my mom in particular, since she works at a vets hospital).
 
Folks like us probably won’t be eligible for a booster until early next year.

@Zincy  
Knowing the words but not the story.

@SparkleDash  
I’ll certainly get a booster when they’re approved for my age (I’m 30, soon to be 31 after next month).

And now the morons are drinking Betadine.
 
Betadine is an iodine based antiseptic. Specifically, Betadine is meant to be gargled or swished in the mouth to treat sores. As someone who gets frequent mouth sores due to genetics and a high acid diet, I am very familiar with the stuff and use it fairly often. It also helps a lot if you cut your mouth or throat eating things like chips.
 
It is not, however, meant to be ingested. And while the concentration of iodine is low, it can still make you sick.
 

 
 
What’s worse, is that this has prompted some people to seek out purer iodine, or iodine salts like potassium iodine, much of which is toxic in high enough doses and are not meant to ingested aside from specific pills like the radiation treatment potassium iodine pills that you take if you’ve been exposed.
 

 
But do you know what the supreme irony here is? Some vaccines contain iodine salts of various configurations. Meaning that these idiots will gladly ingest a vaccine component but won’t get the vax.

@Zincy  
Jesus….

@Zincy  
Someone gotta call out vaccine producers that made something like that!!
 
We need to identify the bad vax.

@Background Pony #512B
 
Iodine salts aren’t dangerous when they’re in vaccines, as they’re normally bonded to other elements to form inactive compounds used as stabilizers. Consider table salt, a mixture of an extremely corrosive gas and an exploding metal, turns into a delicious edible rock. The iodine compounds present in the few vaccines that use them (I think some of the MMR vaccines) are completely inert.
 
They’re also in incredibly low concentrations. Remember, the dose makes the poison, and plenty of things are safe at one level, dangerous at another.
 
The stuff that the antivaxxers are drinking is not, and is in high enough dose that it can be toxic. And ingesting pure elemental iodine, should one be stupid enough to do so, would just kill you stone dead. Or, give you cancer.
 
Given that iodine in crystal form is a purple, jagged metal emitting dense purple fumes and hissing slightly, it pretty much screams “I will kill you”.

@Zincy  
Betadine sounds useful to me, too.

@Mikey  
Hey! Some of us religious aren’t trying to brand vaccines as the coming of Satan.

@Meanlucario
 
On the other hand, the Muslim government of Malaysia readily accepted the vaccines, and also said that it’s not just halal, but it’s also a duty to be vaccinated.
 
Also, cases got a bit up today, especially due to infections in Sarawak, Kedah, Johor, and Kelantan.

Rural Americans are dying at a significantly higher rate than urban Americans.
 
Specifically, 1 in 434 rural Americans have died from Covid, compared with around 1 in 513 urban, and this number is likely an undercount as rural areas have weaken medical reporting.

Well, for the first time, read through this thread, from the start to about halfway through
 
It’s, uh, quite a trip

Latter two links were from this reddit post.

It’s getting pretty exhausting being the only person still masking and keeping sanitizer on hand here locally (along with fiancee and family, and grandparents) - places filled to capacity with not a mask in sight and some of the lowest vax rates in the whole country. People in the deep south in general either assume the pandemic is over, ignore it completely, or whole-heartedly believe it is a hoax still.

Guess our death rate going above our birth rate for the first time in history, along with consistently overfull hospitals all across the state, has nothing to do with ignoring a pandemic huh

In Malaysia, daily cases have dropped to 10,915. Death rates have also started to drop.

With more and more people getting vaccinated, interstate travel might be possible from early October onwards

Today, since July, new Covid cases in Malaysia dropped to 9,066, four digits.

I also got into “close contact” status at my Covid scanner. According to national laws, I might still enter shopping malls (to drink or work) as long as I show in the app that I have no symptoms.

I found out that other people got into this mistake because they forgot to “check out” in their apps after leaving a restaurant.

Still, reading about this made me so angry, as if that person who did this to me took ten days away from my life!

Although Covid cases rose a bit to 8817 (from 8075 yesterday), the positivity rate in Malaysia has dropped to 5.16 percent, the lowest in the country since May after peaking at 15.3 percent on August. This is also the third day in a row where new Covid cases are under 10,000 cases.

“I believe that a company has a right to fire people for any reason if the company feels it nessecary”.

Gets fired for not taking the covid vax.

Person-