Well this sure has exposed the idiots among us. I wonder what ThePundit's opinion is on this matter.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1124175If any of my friends cancel any gaming because of this nonsense panic, I will shit upon them so hard their therapy bills will triple.

#OKBoomer

Quote from: Spinachcat;1124175We're great about working around actual illnesses and work commitments, but useless fear isn't tolerated. Life's hard enough without having crybabies around.

Might take you more seriously if you weren't acting like a crybaby yourself.

Quote from: jeff37923;1124191The biggest threat of the Kung Flu is the panic surrounding it, which you are adding to.

I'm pretty sure it's the people actually dying, the coming economic collapse, and threat of war on the horizon, but you do you.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1124194I wonder if GenCon and Origins will cancel. Any official blathering?

They will either cancel or wait until the hotel or convention center default so they won't have to pay a cancellation fee. Convention season is effectively over.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1124317Fearmongering doesn't work on me.

Neither does rational argument apparently.

Quote from: estar;1124323The problem with this particular pandemic are

Yep, but nobody's going to listen until the bodies start hitting the floor.

Quote from: Haffrung;1124324I could be wrong, but I get the impression more than a few of the 'it's just the flu you stupid libs' crowd are members of one or more of the vulnerable populations: over 60, obese, smokers.

Isn't it ironic, don't ya think?

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1124371This. Holy shit people. COVID-19 is not the end of the world. Not falling for the ad-click motivated hysteria is good. Not contributing to the social contagion of fear is useful. Refusing to take low-impact measures to reduce risk is just silly. If it were 1975 and your gaming choices were "meet in person" or "don't game", that'd be one thing. But it's 20 fucking 20, use the damn internet, ye pig-headed plague-bearing werevermin.

Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1124376The reason coronavirus is less of a threat is because we've got the technology to eventually develop a vaccine,

Hopefully, but there's a reason we don't have one for the 'common cold'.

Quote from: Brad;1124377In case anyone is living under a rock, the US is doing a voluntary self-quarantine of 15 days. Apparently, this is how long it will take to get the health care system ready to roll and handle the virus.

No, it's going to require 18 months based on current models, which is untenable. We'll be lucky if people isolate for one, and the best we can hope for is hospitals become less overloaded.

Quote from: Bren;1124419This thread is an example of why we need government imposed lockdowns. There are just way too many people that are ignorant, often willfully so, and who just don't appear to give a rat's ass for anyone but themselves and (maybe) their immediate family and friends.

Sadly I agree, but fear that solution would be just as bad. I don't want to live among either the dangerously stupid nor aggressively authoritarian.

Quote from: Bren;1124419Taking precautions isn't panic, its just good sense and good citizenship.

Still Chinatown.

Quote from: Luca;1124430Your biggest strategic enemy imposed military-enforced curfew on one of its regions containing tens of millions of people, and incurred major economic losses in order to stop the spread of this particular "flu".
Ever considered they might have a point?

The 'enemy' being right is not something many people can process, and I use it as an indicator of who can can be counted on to avoid unnecessary bias in a crisis.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1124454I'm not going to just roll my brother over the side of the boat because "Some people are gonna die". We'll fight it to the end, instead of giving up like pussies.

You might not have noticed, but there's a difference between willful murder and telling people to take precautions, and by not doing the latter you might inadvertently cast vulnerable people like your brother overboard.

Quote from: FelixGamingX1;1124493Things should start getting back to normal in 3 months.

Again, more like 18 months. The only reason mainland China 'recovered' so quickly is because they're a totalitarian government which forcefully isolated everyone. On the other hand the democratic nation of #Taiwan never got that bad to begin with because the entire society took rational precautions to prevent the spread.

Quote from: Haffrung;1124542Why do RPG forums have so many nutjobs on them? If it's not the far-left progressive loons on RPGnet, it's the far-right nativist nuts here. Maybe I live a sheltered life, but I don't encounter either in my regular life. Is it something about this hobby, or just the hobby forums?

It's the internet itself. It gives people the ability to self-select to such a degree that all you get are ideological echo chambers.

Quote from: Bren;1124709The President said this was a hoax, not a threat, and that he believed his friend the Premier that China had the situation well in hand. That attitude isn't going to convey much urgency to the CDC, the FDA, NIH, private industry, or the American people.

I've found the experts in those fields don't use politicians as their gauge. On the contrary they're usually the ones trying to convey how urgent a situation is.

Quote from: oggsmash;1124720If you think anything gets fixed from this, you dont pay atrention to american history.  Same people who have not got it done for 30 plus years will still be in charge.  The only thing that fixes the mess at this point is a big ol fire in DC.

And even that won't help.

As bad as this is, it's still a mild wakeup call compared to what could have happened, and I just hope to hell enough people are listening now. But Bill Gates put the majority of his wealth towards addressing this and was warning us for years, and instead of heeding him I'm seeing people blame him for the outbreak. Now sure how effective a nation which does that will be in confronting future pandemics.

This is why making everything political is so fucking dangerous.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1124726You might not have noticed, but there's a difference between willful murder and telling people to take precautions, and by not doing the latter you might inadvertently cast vulnerable people like your brother overboard.

That post was me saying I think we should take this pandemic seriously. I think you might be talking past some people.

Bill gates has been warning us for years.  Just as many others have warned us about the spinning plates of our economic system and debts.  I cant say how bad it could have been, because this is just a beginning, the very beginning.  Once a house rots out to a certain degree, better to just burn it down and build a new one, rather than keep slapping paint on it.  Otherwise it falls down on top of you.  If i had to guess how it turns out, it more paint or our heads will be sore.

Sometime when you have a lot of plates spinning the answer is not to stop, it is to spin those suckers faster, innovate as fast as you can so you can keep just in front of disaster.

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I mentioned that, slapping another coat of pain onto the rotting house.  It can work for a while, I think it is possible to come to a huge leap forward and then fix the mess behind, but history says the big bump will come.  Dunno if this is it.

Question:
Are you taking MORE precautions than the recommendations for your area?

If NO, please explain why you hate old and/or sick people.

If YES, please explain why it is ok for you to contribute to the mass hysteria?

Quote from: Bren;1124709Experts are sometimes wrong. I don't know what caused the CDC's sluggish response or their conservative 'not-invented-here' approach to assays.*  But as Harry Truman once said, "The buck stops here." The President said this was a hoax, not a threat, and that he believed his friend the Premier that China had the situation well in hand. That attitude isn't going to convey much urgency to the CDC, the FDA, NIH, private industry, or the American people. Fortunately Trump seems to be taking COVID-19 more seriously now.


* Once we get through this pandemic, I there will be a thorough and unbiased failure modes analysis of the US (lack of) response that finds and fixes the root causes.

What hasn't been covered much is the CDC wasn't just refusing to use tests not invented here, in America. They also insisted the test be made exclusively in house. That's a problem for some very obvious reasons, because we really want to have as many skilled hands as possible working on the project, and not just those from one agency. But it's worse than that, because this isn't really in the CDC wheelhouse. They don't regularly make tests or vaccines, that expertise is in the private labs across the nation. Which the government didn't just refuse to authorize, they explicitly told at least one lab to stop when they created a test.

But sclerotic agencies are never punished for their failures. What's going to happen is they'll point to the failure, and use that as an excuse to get more funding. Large, public failures may cost a few chief bureaucrats their positions (while leaving their nice retirement packages intact), but they benefit the organization as a whole. That's a perverse incentive.

Quote from: spon;1124722Funny things is, you're both right. It looks like IF you shut down real quick and have a good health strategy that tests everyone who might be infected, you seem to get a much lower proportion of deaths per infected person (Germany and S. Korea seem to be in this category), whereas if you didn't shut down and your health service is (locally) overwhelmed you seem to have many more deaths (Italy, France, looks like UK too). But there could be a large number of undiagnosed cases - because testing is so lax.
So it's right that we are basing our projections on bad data, but there are a lot of people dying, and hospitals are getting overwhelmed - with health worker falling sick. And young people aren't immune - of the "confirmed" cases in those below 40, about a fifth need hospital treatment. Note that is "confirmed" cases, not all cases. So if you are young and get sick, it can be really nasty.
I don't think we're overdoing the precautions, I think we need to do more - more testing, more respirators, more research on a vaccine, but if this virus can shut the world down as it has, just imagine one that was truly lethal (50%+ infected cases dying) could do to the world.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The trick is stopping the spread of the disease when it's in the very early stages, by shutting off travel, aggressively testing to ID every case, mandatory quarantine, and tracing every single one of an infected person's contacts. The latter is why this needs to happen very early -- the web of personal contacts grows exponentially as you have more cases, which means you need to catch it very, very quickly or you need to impose very draconian measures. And even that won't help once you start seeing widespread community transmission, as is the case in Europe and the US. Because cases popping up that can't be linked to previous contact networks means the number of people infected is many times the number identified, so there's an basically an invisible network out there spreading the disease.

At that point, you have to move to measures designed to slow the spread of the disease (i.e. the "flatten the curve" everyone's talking about), to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. But that doesn't stop the spread of the disease, or reduce the number of people ultimately affected. It just slows the process down, so fewer people are infected at one time. A necessary corollary is this lengthens the duration of the pandemic. We're looking at 18–24 months, easily. The only think that could stop that is putting every household into quarantine, and only letting them out if they test negative, which would require the capability to test more than 300 million people. Or a vaccine.

I am taking a lot of precautions to isolate and still provide for my aging parents. I may joke about my living room tp fort, but it is a serious matter every year for flu season and far more so this year. Also the tp fort gives me comfort and support (no we do not hoard anything here, besides National Geographics, just well supplied).

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1124726No, it's going to require 18 months based on current models, which is untenable. We'll be lucky if people isolate for one, and the best we can hope for is hospitals become less overloaded.

Fake fucking news...stop watching CNN. If we can hold out another week should be able to handle the demand. Seriously, this is nothing other than fear-mongering. If you mean 18 months until the virus isn't a threat, sure, but that has NOTHING to do with the capacity of the US healthcare system to handle the demand.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1124726I'm pretty sure it's the people actually dying, the coming economic collapse, and threat of war on the horizon, but you do you.

[video=youtube;MPGw5Ucmwk8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPGw5Ucmwk8&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR3AlH2gDcU61m2GrFFaoE2VbEVtrzG-7g8S9fJ1NMT3y0vm42apPtTdSQQ[/youtube]

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1124731That post was me saying I think we should take this pandemic seriously. I think you might be talking past some people.

Apparently so. Apologies.

Quote from: Brad;1124776Fake fucking news...stop watching CNN. If we can hold out another week should be able to handle the demand. Seriously, this is nothing other than fear-mongering. If you mean 18 months until the virus isn't a threat, sure, but that has NOTHING to do with the capacity of the US healthcare system to handle the demand.

Wish I could say the same here.

Coronavirus Origin Theories
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Source: https://creazilla.com/nodes/19974-coronavirus-origin-theories-poster-vector

Quote from: tutu;1125246Coronavirus Origin Theories
*snip*

Hey, tutu. You signed up just to post in the coronavirus gaming thread?
What RPGs do you play? Have you been playing online? How has the coronavirus situation impacted your table top gaming?

I'm using the pandemic as inspiration. I've come up with a few potential pandemics to afflict my RPG worlds with, to oppress my players with. Below is the first I've finished: the Corvixix fungal parasite. Aside from turning its victims into walking fear-gas bombs, it turns them into crowbait. Nasty stuff, that.

Check it out!

https://www.godspargames.com/godspargames/corvixix

We've got our technical difficulties mostly taken care of. I need to figure out how to mute my brother since we're both in the same room, and hearing him talk and hearing him over the voice chat is very difficult.
So I'm getting some gaming online done this week, and looking into playing X-Wing miniatures using Table Top Simulator. Gotta tackle that next.