UK police punch a shop owner in the face for being open, then arrest the victim: Links 2, February 7, 2021

Posted on by

1. Toronto police arresting people for standing in a park at a protest against arresting people for standing in a park.

2. Two weeks to flatten the curve in 2019 to continue till JUNE 2021

3. NYC vaccination program appears to be similar to Canada’s in that there are not that many shots to give.

NYC’s COVID vaccine hubs are ghost towns as DOH mum on distribution

The city’s 15 vaccination hubs were ghost towns last Saturday, and the city Department of Health is refusing to reveal just how bad distribution went.

One DOH staffer stationed at the Hillcrest High School hub in Queens on Jan. 30 said he did nothing all day.

“You cannot imagine how much nothing it was,” he said of the demoralizing day.

He said there were about 70 workers on hand — some earning overtime pay for 12-hour shifts — and about 10 people to vaccinate.

The worker said several appeals were made to DOH officials to be able to vaccinate people without appointments, and they were denied. He said the hubs had about 400 to 700 doses.

“We could have used that day to vaccinate thousands of people … and we just blew it,” he said

The issue of the empty sites was first brought to light by City Councilman Mark Treyger who tweeted a video of an empty hub at Coney Island’s Lincoln High School.

4. Radioactive Material at Iranian Site Raises Doubts about Tehran’s Nuclear Intentions

Diplomats revealed that inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency found traces of radioactive materials in samples taken from a site in Iran, which raised further doubts about the nature of the Iranian nuclear program.

These reports coincided with a meeting that gathered US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and their German counterpart, Heiko Maas, amid the West’s welcome of US President Joe Biden’s desire to return to the nuclear agreement and assume a leadership role on the international scene.

The US State Department issued a brief statement about the ministers’ video conference, noting that it touched on the topics of Iran, China, Russia, Myanmar, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic.

5. Gotta like this guy

6. UK: Police punch a shop owner in the face for opening

And of course they arrest the victim.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

7 Replies to “UK police punch a shop owner in the face for being open, then arrest the victim: Links 2, February 7, 2021”

  1. I don’t understand how there can be asymptomatic transmission, but if you have actually been ill with a fever etc., you are considered not able to transmit 10 days after you test positive for the virus? That is, a negative test is no longer necessary to establish that you no longer can spread the virus.

    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/end-home-isolation.html
    If you continue to have no symptoms, you can be with others after 10 days have passed since you had a positive viral test for COVID-19.

    • This cites the data that seem to form the basis for that December 2020 recommendation https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/duration-isolation.html So we have some people being locked down and other people perhaps have the possibility of distributing the virus?

      So, here’s an example of the citations, which seem sparse (‘personal communication”, “unpublished data”) when you consider that they are being used to form health policy for hundreds of millions of people.
      For patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, replication-competent virus has not been recovered after 10 days following symptom onset (CDC, unpublished data, 2020; Wölfel et al., 2020; Arons et al., 2020; Bullard et al., 2020; Lu et al., 2020; personal communication with Young et al., 2020; Korea CDC, 2020). Recovery of replication-competent virus between 10 and 20 days after symptom onset has been documented in some persons with severe COVID-19 that, in some cases, was complicated by immunocompromised state (van Kampen et al., 2020). However, in this series of patients, it was estimated that 88% and 95% of their specimens no longer yielded replication-competent virus after 10 and 15 days, respectively, following symptom onset.

      • Dead fragments of virus, no longer infectious.

        Slightly tangential, but an interesting local case:

        Virus mutations associated with persistent infection: Strains can mutate in patients with immune deficiencies who fight infections for months

        Among the 100 million people around the world who have battled coronavirus infections, scientists are turning to the case of a 45 year old COVID-19 patient in Boston to understand how the virus is able to outwit humans. During his 154 day illness – one of the longest on record – the patient’s body became a crucible of riotous viral mutation.

        He offered the world one of the first sightings of a key mutation in the virus’s spike protein that set off alarm bells when it was later found in strains in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil.…

        Scientists couldn’t say whether the Boston patient was failing to kick the virus or whether it was changing so completely that his immune system couldn’t recognize it.

        One thing was clear: More than half of the alterations [in the genome sequence] occurred in a stretch of genetic code that dictates the structure of the virus’ spike protein, the protuberance that latches onto human cells and initiates an infection.

        The virus’ “receptor binding domain” – essentially the key that picks the lock on a human cell – accounts for only 2% of the virus’ genetic code. But 38% of the mutations spun off during the Boston patient’s prolonged illness were concentrated in just that spot…

        Scientists are still trying to understand how certain mutations like N501Y have cropped up in so many places at once. Has the mushrooming scale of the pandemic given the virus too many opportunities to alter itself?

        Or are these mutations arising in a small number of people, like the Boston patient, and then somehow hitching a ride around the world?

        Both factors are probably at work, and the longer and hotter the pandemic rages, the more chances the virus will have to devise random mutations.

        The Boston patient shows why that can be so dangerous. In his case, the stretches of genetic code that were most prone to change affected structures that COVID-19 vaccines and drugs are designed to recognize. Now there are hints that the changes could undermine the value of those remedies.

        https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2031364